


All's Well That Ends

by AltUniverseWash



Series: Pyrope & Crocker, Investigators [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: 1930s, Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society (Homestuck), Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternate Universe - Noir, Assassination, Austin - Freeform, Bisexual Female Character, Conspiracy, Crime Fighting, Crime Scenes, Crimes & Criminals, Detective Noir, Detectives, Drama, F/F, Film Noir, Gen, Gritty, Homestuck AU, Human/Troll Relationship (Homestuck), Investigations, JaneRezi - Freeform, JuneVris, Kissing, Lesbian Character, Midnight Crew - Freeform, Murder, Non-Explicit Sex, Organized Crime, POV Bisexual Character, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Plot, Plot-driven narrative, Pre-Sburb/Sgrub, Private Investigators, Retcon, Romance, Secrets, Texas, Thriller, Time Loop, Time Travel, Trans Female Character, Trolls (Homestuck), Violence, noir, trans mituna captor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:35:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 48,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23501689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AltUniverseWash/pseuds/AltUniverseWash
Summary: The year is 1938 - it's been three years since Terezi Pyrope and Jane Crocker encountered the Order of the Creator and had their ideas about reality itself shaken to the very core. They tried to resume a normal life - until receiving a cryptic telegram from June Egbert urging them to travel down to Austin, Texas.As the sweltering heat of a particularly hot April bears down on them, Jane and Terezi begin to uncover a vast conspiracy that reaches from the very bottom of the working class to the highest echelons of power. Racing against time, they must uncover the secrets behind the enigmatic Trans-Southern Railway Corporation and figure out how to solve their strangest case yet:How do you prevent a murder that's already been committed?
Relationships: Jane Crocker/Terezi Pyrope, June Egbert/Vriska Serket
Series: Pyrope & Crocker, Investigators [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632040
Comments: 16
Kudos: 10





	1. A Long and Dirty Road

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to soup for inspiring this next chapter in the Pyrope & Crocker, Investigators series with their piece here: https://flickerfins.tumblr.com/post/614581148641787904/my-piece-for-the-ladystuck2020-exchange-this-was
> 
> TW: There are scenes of graphic violence, major character death, and non-explicit consensual foreplay/sex in this fic. TW's will be provided before applicable chapters as needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter depicts a major character death.

**Paige, TX (southeast of Austin)** **  
**_Tuesday, 4/5/1938 (prime)_

Jane and Terezi -(STOP)-   
URGENT -(STOP)-   
COME AT ONCE -(STOP)-   
June

“I don’t get it,” Terezi said, turning the telegram over in her hands, somehow able to feel the microscopic ridges of the letters left by the vaguest impression of ink on paper. She had a deep frown on her face, the lines of her brows casting sharp shadows in the light of the noon-time Texas sun.

I shook my head from behind the wheel of the ‘33 Buick we’d inherited from Vriska Serket before she and June Egbert decided to pull up stakes and move themselves all the way down to Texas. I wasn’t going to lie and say that June’s telegram made any more sense to me than it did to Terezi. A year and change with little more than the occasional letter letting us know that they were still doing well enough. Vriska had taken her money and retired to a life of part-time acting. June had gotten a job with the water commission in Austin, Texas.

That had all changed four days ago when we’d gotten the mysterious telegram from June dropped under the door of the office by the courier. Of course I’d rung June right away – April Fool’s day pranks and all that – but June had answered with a tone that suggested something serious had gone wrong. She refused to say anything else over the phone – just insisted that we drive down to Austin immediately to meet with her. She specifically asked that we not say anything to Vriska. That wasn’t just a red flag, it was a whole dang red banner at the front of an entire parade of trouble.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I responded, raising my voice over the sound of the wind. “I haven’t noticed anything unusual in her letters.”

Terezi shook her head, running her fingers over the telegram again, as if it would give her some additional insight.

“She sounded terrified on the phone,” Terezi said.

“Yeah? I didn’t think so… maybe just worried about something.” I was trying my best to stay optimistic, but it wasn’t going well. There was a hole in my guts where the worry had burrowed its way inside and made a nice home for itself. That feeling wasn’t going away until I’d had the chance to talk to June face-to-face and make _sure_ that nothing was wrong.

“Terrified,” Terezi repeated. “Just like how she sounded after the village.”

The Village. Something we didn’t talk about much.

Three years ago, and it still didn’t feel real. Because everything we experienced in that hellish week couldn’t possibly be real. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. Every time I caught flashes of that shadow in my mind’s eye – the thing that was so impossibly _vast_ that it barely registered as something that could exist. And the idea that we’d been living the same experiences more than once – that wasn’t something my mind really wanted to accept.

“You’re being paranoid,” I snapped back – the long drive and the sweltering heat was getting to me – making me jumpy. How in the world was it already pushing a hundred degrees in early April?

I groaned, mostly to myself, then glanced over at Terezi. “I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have said that. I just… if she was so scared, why not say something on the phone?”

“I don’t know,” Terezi said. “Maybe she was afraid of who might be listening.”

And, honestly, that made a lot of sense. Made sense in a way that I really didn’t feel like admitting. How hard would it be to imagine? That maybe we hadn’t been as successful at rooting the Order of the Creator out as we thought? Or that maybe someone still affiliated with the New York Council was trying to exact revenge on June or Vriska for… well, it could be for a lot of different reasons. I didn’t think Vriska was a bad person at heart, but she’d certainly done a lot of things that had a tendency to really tick folks off.

“I think this is something big,” Terezi said, and that was all she had on the matter because she went back to tracing invisible lines on the telegram and looking out the open automobile window.

I had a hard time arguing with Terezi’s logic, even to myself. I certainly wasn’t going to open my mouth and make it obvious that I was probably even more clueless than she was on this one. After all, I hadn’t even picked up on June being anything more than a bit worried. That Terezi was able to hear that over a telephone line – that was amazing!

It gave me something to think about, anway. I kept driving, pushing the Buick up past fifty and barreling down the road. Terezi was right – this felt like something big.

If we’re being honest, that was a feeling I was getting pretty dang sick of by now.

* * *

**Austin, TX** **  
**_Tuesday, 4/5/1938 (prime)_

We’d stopped on the way somewhere that had a party line and gotten through to June – there was a diner in South Austin that she went to sometimes. That’d do for a meeting, she said. Simple enough.

Terezi and I walked into the diner about a half hour after that phone call, but we didn’t see June anywhere. It was a cozy little place – a lot of quiet booths in the back where you could have a nice conversation without being overheard by most folks. It looked troll-owned too, by the look of the staff. I wondered for a minute if this was somewhere that she came with Vriska – in my experience the trolls knew how to mind their own damn business, and that seemed like something that June and Vriska would appreciate.

We took a seat in the back and ordered some food. We were starving after spending the better part of seven hours driving, and it would keep the waitress from coming back and asking if we were ready to order yet. I propped my elbows on the table and groaned.

“There’s nothing we can do but wait,” Terezi said. “Whatever it is and however urgent it is, we have to wait.”

I knew that, of course, but something about the way she said it was calming. I reached across the table and wiggled my fingers in front of her – she clasped her hands around mine and squeezed lightly. That felt nice, and it helped take some of the tension down a bit.

“It’s not like someone got killed,” Terezi shrugged. “She would’ve said more.”

Another fifteen minutes went by and our food came out, but June was still nowhere to be seen. Another ten minutes was all it took for Terezi and I to finish the food, and still no June. This was all shaking out to be a bust and nothing more. I was getting ready to head out and find a place to stay – maybe call June from a hotel and tell her we’d meet up with her that evening once we’d had a chance to take a nap and the temperature went back to something approaching sanity.

I was about to suggest we get up and leave when the door to the diner opened and June Egbert came walking in, looking like she’d been running a dang foot race. She was sweating – which wasn’t entirely out-of-place given the heat – and she kept looking around the diner as if she expected something to jump out at her. God’s truth, she looked pretty awful. Almost as bad as that fateful day in Miskatonic…

June saw us and came hurrying up to the booth, sitting down next to Terezi. When the waitress came up, June ordered a glass of water and nothing else. It wasn’t until the water came and she’d had a chance to take a drink that June said more than a brief greeting to either one of us.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking back and forth between Terezi and me. “I should’ve said more, but I don’t think it’s safe.”

I was still feeling pretty down from the heat and the drive and all the god-awful mystery of this, so I just about lost my cool. “What the heck, June?! You tell us to drive down here to gosh-darn Texas without so much as an explanation other than its real dang important. You come running in here and you hardly say a word to us. What in the damn world is going on, if you’ll excuse my harsh language?!”

Terezi nodded, “Yeah. What she said.”

June took another long drink of her water, set the glass down, and took a deep breath that ended up stuttering halfway through.

“Oh… god…” she said, and something about her voice felt very wrong. She sounded so _tired_ – and it didn’t make sense the same way that her running in here the way she did made no sense.

“Okay, what the hell is on your mind lately?” Terezi asked – she was sounding about as annoyed as I felt. “I can tell that you’re scared of something – don’t even try to hide that from me. But what the hell, June? You’re not telling us anything, you’re not giving us anything to work with. I really doubt you dragged us all the way to goddamn Texas to just have a friendly little chat.”

June was shaking her head. She looked like she wanted to cry, but all the tears had dried up. “I don’t know how to put it… I don’t know how to tell you…”

“What?” I asked, still feeling annoyed… but also starting to worry more and more. June looked like she was about to come unglued. “Is it something with Vriska? The Council? The Order? Some other dang folks she managed to piss off?!”

I might’ve been a little bit loud at the end – if Vriska was sliding back on her various promises to get away from the world of crime she’d left then she and I were gonna have some strong words together.

“No… not like that. I mean… I don’t think so. Oh god…” she put her head in her hands. “There’s so much I don’t know. So much I can’t figure out on my own. I keep trying… over and over.”

She looked next to her at Terezi, then across the table to me. “I can’t be like you two! I tried… I really did. But it’s not enough time and I can’t figure things out. I don’t even know where to start, and I can’t tell her because that makes everything worse.”

June was rambling, and this didn’t make any sense. I could figure she was hiding something from Vriska – that was pretty dang obvious. It was something big too – again, pretty dang obvious.

“The most I can figure out,” June continued, talking into her hands, “is it has something to do with the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation… and a woman named Mituna…”

* * *

**Austin, TX** **  
**_Wednesday, 4/13/1938 (prime)_

The club was closed this time of day – it was late enough in the day that all the patrons had been long-since shuffled off home and the place had been cleaned up, but still not late enough that the staff had come back to start preparing for that evening. The whole place still smelled like stale booze and old cigarettes. It gave me a weird feeling that reminded me too much of some very unpleasant places I’d been in the past few years.

The whole week had given me those feelings in ways that I couldn’t even begin to describe to someone who wasn’t familiar with what I’d been through. Terezi understood, but she was off chasing down our last viable lead into the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation. She wasn’t here for this – I was once again on my own.

And what a lead the TSRC had been – a veritable hornet’s nest of lies and misdirection. To even call it a “railway company” seemed to put a point so fine on the term that it turned into a razor and cut right down to the very bone. Of course it was _technically_ still true, so that was something. Not much… but something.

With Mituna out of the picture, we didn’t have much to go on. But she’d pointed us in the direction of the club. Again, it wasn’t much, but it was something. Terezi was still trying to figure out whether this was all more smoke and mirrors, but we’d both agreed that it would be for the best if I went anyway. After all, it was going to be quiet and maybe I could figure out something useful.

I’d slipped in the back. You develop a lot of skills in my line of work, and jimmying open a back door is definitely one of them. This place wasn’t much on security – to call what they had on the back door a “lock” was being generous to the point of absolute horse-nonsense. It took me two minutes with a length of wire to have it open and get inside.

The weird feeling just got stronger the further I moved into the club. Working more-or-less by instinct, I pulled out my trusty revolver and held it low – tucked just barely out-of-sight next to my hip. I didn’t have any specific reason to think I would need the gun, but it made me feel a little bit better to at least have it as an _option!_

This place was a pretty standard night club – the same kind I’d been in many times before. It reminded me of Fairytale in Harlem… only less nice. Or maybe like the Diamond Carberet in the Bowery… only significantly more nice. A nice middle ground in terms of the general air of decrepitude.

The back door led in through the kitchens and service areas – storage and dressing rooms and all that good stuff. Once I was out of there, I found myself in a little dining room in the back that was close to the kitchens. So this was where the boring folks who didn’t care as much about the show as they did about having a nice conversation would sit. Good to know. Perfectly generic and uninteresting in every possible way.

I crossed past the bar area – that was where the folks who cared more about getting sloshed off their rear-ends would go – and out into the main floor of the club. Tables sat with their chairs neatly stacked on top. A setting I’d seen plenty of times. Maybe the specific shapes and configurations changed but…

There was someone coming in through the back. A _bang_ and the door from the alley slammed open, and I could hear footsteps running. I turned and raised my revolver, pulling back the hammer.

“Jane!” It was Terezi’s voice. But she wasn’t supposed to be here. “Oh shit! JANE?!”

“I’m here,” I called out. “No one else is home.”

There was more clamoring as Terezi was working her way through the dining area and I saw her step around the bar. Her eyes were wild – staring – and she looked like she was on the verge of a panic attack. I’d only seen her like this a couple times before, and I could feel the floor dropping out from under my stomach as soon as it registered in my brain.

“She’s dead, Jane! Not just _gone_ – she’s fucking _dead!_ ” I stopped – almost dropped my dang revolver.

“How?!” I knew it was technically _possible_ – that was always something I was worried about. But Mituna had been so… she’d seemed so god-damn _capable_ that it didn’t make sense to me.

“That piece of shit got to her in a hotel right down the road. She never even got clear of the city!”

That was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. That the same threads lead back to this club that had come up in a too-casual mention in a conversation that had already felt like it was tailored to making sure we ended up in the right place at the right time to see…

“What is that?” Terezi asked, her nose twitching. “I smell blood.”

I couldn’t smell anything. Of course I couldn’t smell anything… but I got nervous as soon as she said it. I knew she wasn’t imagining things. I had my revolver up again – hammer back, ready. Terezi pulled out her own Colt 1911 and played with the safety nervously.

“This whole week has been fucking _wrong_ ,” she said, smelling the air in the club – probably trying to discern the faint odor of blood on top of the stench of cheap booze and cheaper smokes.

“Mituna was the same as the others?” I asked the question already knowing what the answer would be. Terezi nodded solemnly.

“Single shot to the back of the head – no signs of a struggle. Powder smells the same as the others… of course that just means it was the same kind of gun. Even my nose isn’t good enough to tell you the precise loading.”

I supposed that it didn’t matter much now. It felt like we were at the end of the line, somehow. I didn’t have any way of actually _knowing_ that, but there was that strong feeling that we’d run out of time. I began to look around the club’s main room, looking for any sign of disturbance. If Terezi had only just now smelled the blood, that meant it wasn’t coming from the kitchens or the back area. That didn’t leave me with much left to explore.

The small stage at the end of the room had a set of drab orange curtains at the end.

Something was off about how the curtains sat – something was behind them – causing them to bulge out in a way they wouldn’t normally. I held my revolver up and slowly began to approach the stage.

There was a little glint and something drew my eye – something catching the light at the base of the stage. I bent down…

A pair of glasses – one lens smashed. They looked just like the pair that Vriska Serket wore.

Revolver up – heart pounding – adrenaline rushing through my body. Terezi was right behind me with her Colt at the ready. I’d trusted her with my life so many times that this felt distressingly normal.

It was dark on the stage – it was going to be difficult to make out anything behind the curtain. I found myself wishing desperately that I’d bothered to bring a flashlight – or that I still smoked and could rely on my trusty lighter. Except my trusty lighter was in a desk drawer two thousand miles back east.

“Watch my back,” I said quietly to Terezi as I put my revolver back into its holster on my shoulder. I reached out and grasped the orange curtains, pulling them back around whatever object was causing them to stick out like that.

“NO!” I heard Terezi call out before I even realized why. She processed what was happening a lot quicker than I did – it took me a second to pull the curtain aside and look down. It took another second to take what I was seeing and distill it down into anything remotely resembling meaningful.

It was a body. Of course it was a body – as soon as Terezi said she smelled blood I had been prepared for that eventuality. It was still dark – I had to move in closer to see…

Vriska.

She was lying there on the stage, surrounded by a smeared dark stain.

Her eyes were open – staring into forever.

There was a single exit wound blooming in the middle of her forehead.

* * *

**Austin, TX** **  
**_Tuesday, 4/5/1938 (first derivative)_

June was shaking her head. She looked like she wanted to cry, but all the tears had dried up. “I don’t know how to put it… I don’t know how to tell you…”

“What?” I asked, still feeling annoyed… but also starting to worry more and more. June looked like she was about to come unglued. “Is it something with Vriska? The Council? The Order? Some other dang folks she managed to piss off?!”

“Oh god…” June was whispering to herself. “Oh god…” She trailed off, saying the rest under her breath. I couldn’t hear her…

But Terezi could. I saw my gal’s eyes go wide.

“What do you mean _it’s going to happen again_ ?!” She slapped the table – a bit harder than I think she meant to. “What the _fuck_ is happening, June?!”


	2. The First Derivative

“Seriously, what the  _ fuck?! _ ” Terezi was getting angry. “I’m not doing this all over again – no more of the weird half-truths and little bits and pieces of the real story. We’re  _ not doing this shit again! _ ”

Heat behind her words that more than matched the sweltering afternoon – Terezi wasn’t just angry, she was  _ furious _ . Not even at June… not really. She was furious at everything we’d been through. All of us. All the people who tried to kill us, or to make us their pawns in some kind of long game that only they understood.

“I… I’m so sorry,” June had found the tears now – she was crying in a way that was so open – so incredibly  _ raw _ – that I couldn’t help but feel my own heart starting to ache watching it. She put her head in her hands and a sob wracked her petite shoulders. The waitress walked over, eyeing us all suspiciously.

“It’s fine,” I said. “She’s just having a moment. You know how us flighty broads are.” I punctuated the remark with a  _ this isn’t for you _ scowl and the waitress shrugged and walked off. I turned back toward June.

“You’re gonna have to cut us in here, June. What in the heck is going on?” I asked, tapping on the table nervously. This gal was starting to scare me a little bit.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I shouldn’t have dragged you two into this, and now I can’t take any of it back.”

This gal was getting more and more cryptic by the second, and I was having about enough of it.

“Listen, you,” I said – I was trying for  _ stern _ but I think my tone might’ve just suggested  _ annoyed _ . “No matter what you dragged us into… or what you  _ think _ you dragged us into… this isn’t going to get better if you keep playing hide-and-seek with the facts. Our policy is the same as with our clients – we can’t help you if you hold out on us. So stop holding out and  _ just tell us _ already!”

She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. The ghost of a smile – not a happy one – played on her face. June nodded.

“I know all this. I’m pretty sure we’re going to have this conversation again anyway.”

And the idea struck me that she wasn’t talking about having the conversation  _ later _ either. I could feel my eyes staring, unblinking, right at June. Studying her face – looking for clues to what she was getting at.

She sighed, heavily. “Fine… I guess it didn’t work when I  _ didn’t _ tell you. I might as well try it the other way this time.”

I was still staring, because I had a strong feeling I knew  _ exactly _ where this was going.

“Vriska dies,” she said, and it was clear that she was trying desperately to stop from crying. “In a week, she dies. Someone shoots her in the back of the head and leaves her body in a club in Austin called the Royal Flush.”

That sense of deja vu again – a stabbing pain right into the back of my head.

Did she say  _ in a week?! _

“It… it happened already. I was at home and I got a call from the local police and… I had to identify her body. They said she was at the club and was killed as part of some gangland thing.” June looked down at the floor.

“So I did… I did that thing I can do. It was  _ hard _ … I was able to head back about a week. I thought if I had longer, maybe I could figure out what was going on. So I asked Vriska if she was still in touch with the people she used to know and she told me she wasn’t.”

I was still trying to wrap my head around this, because what June was describing was her literally re-starting time itself. If I hadn’t already experienced it myself I’d probably be calling to toss her in the looney bin.

“You believed her,” I asked.

June shrugged and fidgeted in her seat. “Sure. Why would she lie, after everything? She’s not in touch with the council, and it’s not like they have that much sway down here anyway.”

That part felt important, but I needed to sort through things in order of importance. Most to least… maybe starting with the murder that hadn’t happened yet.

“Wait a minute – just back up a second,” I said, trying very hard to stay at least a little bit calm. “You’re saying that in a week Vriska will get killed, but you turned everything back. Why didn’t you just tell her not to go to the club, no matter what?”

June made a noise that sounded like a sob and a laugh had a child together – and that kid was ugly as sin. “You actually think I didn’t think of that? I’m not a baby, Jane. First time I tried to tell her not to go there. Tried to keep steering her away from it.”

_ First time? _ Oh… I wasn’t liking where this was going.

“It didn’t  _ matter! _ She ended up in the club anyway, somehow. I don’t even know the details – just that she was acting very strangely and had to keep leaving the house. She seemed worried about someone following her too – kept jumping at every sound. Same thing though – in a week, she was dead.”

June closed her eyes tightly. “I looped things back again and the next time I actually told her outright what had happened. I told her about the time loop and… she believed me. But… it  _ still _ didn’t matter. She said that she had to leave but promise she’d stay away from the Royal Flush.”

From June’s downcast expression and the fact that we were sitting here, I guessed that she had no, in fact, stayed away from the Royal Flush. My head was really starting to hurt, like someone had taken an icepick and driven it right in between my eyes.

June banged a fist down on the table, rattling the plates that were still sitting there. “It doesn’t  _ matter! _ I tried to go back twice more but… every time I went back it felt like I was ripping something out of my own heart. It… it  _ hurts _ . I don’t know how many more times I can do it, and every time Vriska would end up dead anyway.”

There was something suspiciously absent from this narrative – she hadn’t yet mentioned when she’d called us. I had a bad feeling, and I wasn’t going to wait on getting confirmation.

“How many times have you looped things back since we came in?” She stared at me – I shrugged. “It was a guess, doll – neither one of us knows when you do this stuff.”

Well, not  _ exactly _ – but I knew I got a kind of feeling. A sense that things were off – that feeling of deja vu.

“Only once,” she said, softly. “I didn’t tell you all the time stuff before. I… I didn’t want to freak you out and have you refuse to help me. But it didn’t work. Vriska still died… just, you were there that time to find the body and tell me…”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples with my fingers. We were living in a time that was derivative of one we’d already lived through. The very idea was hard to even hold in my mind.

“Did we come up with any leads, at least? You said it’s a week from now when… when everything happens. We must’ve told you  _ something _ between when we talked and when…” I trailed off – I didn’t want to rub the poor girl’s face in it.

“A little bit,” June replied. “I think that you wanted to protect me as much as possible, and I didn’t tell you anything that was very specific – just that I was worried about Vriska and some vague stuff about people following her. I don’t know what you dug up, but you only told me a little bit.”

She paused, seemed to be trying to collect herself.

“You mentioned a company – the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation. And that name means a lot down here – they’re basically the only reason that half the towns all the way out to California even exist. Along with the oil folks and the water companies, Trans-Southern might as well be the law around here.”

Another pause – this wasn’t much, but if that’s what we gave her then there was no helping it.

“The other thing was you mentioned a woman’s name – Mituna Captor. I believe you said she was an Alternian and I think you were looking for her, but you never told me exactly who she was. I think she’s in Austin, at least. Or nearby.”

June stopped talking, put her head down on the table, and let out a loud groan. “I’m so sorry… I wish I could tell you more.”

“You know we’re gonna have to talk to Vriska,” I added quietly. “There’s no way this whole secrecy thing will end well.”

“No!” June shot up in her seat and  _ shouted _ . The waitress looked over again from where she was standing across the diner. I waved an  _ it’s fine _ her way and turned to June.

“And why not?!” I hissed between my teeth. “Do you  _ want _ her to end up dead again?!” It was probably a bit more than was strictly necessary to say, but I was getting angry.

“I don’t  _ know! _ Every time I talked to her about this it all ended up happening anyway. I’ve got this bad feeling that… I don’t know – just that it would be real bad to try to tell her. At least directly.”

That would make things tricky. Protecting someone from their own inevitable murder when they didn’t even know about it – all of that seemed like an incredibly tall order.

“Okay, fine,” I replied, exasperated. “But if this goes belly-up and she dies again… do you know for sure you’ll be able to wind things back?”

The look in June’s eyes was hard to place. She looked so distant and haunted – as if it took a lot of energy for her just to speak. “I don’t know.”

I looked over at Terezi – she must’ve somehow felt the glance, because she shrugged and put on a  _ what can we do  _ expression. And, indeed, what could we do? We couldn’t  _ make _ June have information that she didn’t have. I summoned up all the reserves I had in me and looked right at June.

“We’ll do it. We’ll take the case. But on one condition – if you find out more about this you  _ have _ to tell us. This thing isn’t going to work if you’re withholding information from us.”

* * *

We saw June to her car and returned to the Buick. Despite the fact that we’d left the windows all open, the car was sweltering inside. I halfway considered putting the top down, but facing the merciless eye of the Texas sun seemed like a worse fate under the circumstances.

Terezi and I sat in the front seat – not saying anything for a little while. Unsurprisingly, it was Terezi who spoke up first.

“Can you believe we’re doing this shit  _ again?! _ ”

And the truth was – no, I couldn’t. I could barely believe that we’d even done this stuff to begin with. The whole idea that anyone had the power to reverse the flow of time itself – and yet that was something we’d all experienced firsthand. It wasn’t the only thing that had made me question what I thought I knew about reality in the past few years either.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, staring out the front window. “It’s happening whether we like it or not. We either get on board and try to do something about it or we ride it out and Vriska ends up dead. And June resets everything… except I don’t know how long she can keep doing that before she… before she can’t.”

Terezi’s nose twitched. “Yeah, she didn’t smell great – like she’d been staying for a week straight. Like… she was gonna start falling apart soon.”

I didn’t think she meant it literally, but it was still a disconcerting image. And who knew – maybe it  _ was _ literally true. It wasn’t like either one of us was an expert on women who were magically capable of time-traveling.

“Well, this is what we’ve got to work with,” I said with a sigh. “I don’t like it, but… like I said, it doesn’t matter. We have exactly two almost-useless pieces of information to go on. Because apparently our past selves… alternate selves… future selves? I don’t know – we were too goddamn tight-lipped to tell the one person who could bring that information back to us. But we know that the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation is a big player down here. Honestly… if something funny’s going on, I wouldn’t bet against them being involved somehow.”

I took a deep breath – held it in – collected myself. It was going to be a long week.

“And, of course, we have a single name to work on. That’s not great… but it’s also not unworkable.” Sometimes all you needed to unravel the whole tapestry was to start pulling on a single thread, after all.

“Precisely summarized, my dear Crocker,” Terezi was at least trying to lighten the mood, which I appreciated. “Now what the hell do we  _ do _ with any of this?”

“Find someplace to go sit that’s not a boiling sweat-pit,” I said. At this point it was getting hard to ignore the heat. “Then we’ll regroup and figure out how in the heck we’re supposed to approach this case.”

A case where the murder was so premeditated it hadn’t even happened yet!


	3. Pillars of the Community

The hotel room was marginally cooler. Not by any significant amount, mind you, but at least enough that it was bearable. We now had the privacy to strip down to our underwear too, and that helped a little bit. I was seriously considering drawing a cold bath just to cool off.

Normally I’d be a big fan of seeing my gal down in her drawers and nothing else – but the heat and the general gravity of the situation, plus the fact that we’d been stuck in a car for the better part of the last three days… all of that combined into a combination that was distinctly unappealing. Terezi didn’t look like she was faring much better – she’d already soaked a towel and had draped it over the back of her neck. She looked miserable.

Before we checked into the room, I’d popped by a news stand and bought one copy of everything that could even be considered a local paper. The stack of newspapers was set out on the hotel bed and had spilled out onto the floor as Terezi and I paged through looking for the basic lay of the land.

The problem was that neither of us knew anything about this town. With June’s insistence that we not talk to Vriska, we really didn’t have much of a way of knowing about the locals. Even with all the bizarre stuff that had happened during our last adventure with the Serket-Egbert crowd, at least Vriska had been able to generally steer us in the right direction. Not having that advantage was a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be.

One thing that was definitely clear from flipping through that veritable mountain of yellow journalism was that June wasn’t exaggerating about the role that Trans-Southern played in the local economy. Every single paper had multiple ads for them. Not only that, but the oil and water companies as well – those were a bit more subtle, but still every-present. It was hard to find a story that didn’t subtly mention one or more of them – sponsored by this oil company or in partnership with that water concern. A particular article in one of the larger papers about how East Texas Water and Mineral Rights, as a good Christian business, was set to hand out food to the less-fortunate that upcoming Easter.

“This is such shit,” Terezi scoffed as she scanned through the article. “They spend a lot of time making out how good these companies are but… everything reads like a company paper.”

“Yeah, I know.” I tossed my own paper aside with a grunt of frustration. “This really isn’t helping… why are we doing this again?”

I already knew the answer – I was just frustrated. But there weren’t many other choices for the time being.

“God I need a drink,” I said. “What time do the bars open around here?”

Terezi shrugged. “No clue, but that’s actually not a bad idea. See if we can find some dive where we can blend in and I can do my thing.”

In this case  _ doing my thing _ was going to be sitting still and listening in on other folks’ conversations. It was something that Terezi, with her exceptional hearing, was especially adept at.

“Well…” I hesitated. It felt like every second we spent wasting was a second we could be putting toward figuring everything out. Like we were constantly racing against the clock. Although, in a very real sense, that’s exactly what we were doing. “I say we get some rest and then go find somewhere that the locals are likely to be hanging out. See what we can overhear, try to get a feeling for the place. Then we can ask a couple pointed questions and maybe start to figure out who this Mituna person is and where she might be.”

“You know,” Terezi said, thoughtfully. “June said her last name was  _ Captor _ – same as Sollux back in New York.”

“So? I thought Alternian last names were just kind of general groupings for certain genetic lines.”

“They are!” She exclaimed. “So that means that Mituna probably has the same mechanical inclinations as Sollux. That might help us to track her down.”

I walked over to the bed and flopped down – Terezi jumped on a second later, lying next to me.

“Maybe she’s working for the railway?” I wondered aloud. “That seems like a pretty straightforward connection, if those were the only two key pieces of information we bothered to provide June with.”

I sighed. “We really didn’t help ourselves out much, did we? I suppose there must’ve been a reason for it.”

Terezi reached out and put a hand on my bare stomach – it was still hot as heck, but I didn’t mind so much.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “We probably wanted to keep June safe. After everything, do you really blame us?”

It felt weird to talk like that about ourselves, even if it made sense under the circumstances. “I guess you’re right.” I put my hand over hers. In my state, that was about all the intimacy I could manage.

* * *

I had originally intended to set the small alarm clock that was sitting in the room for sometime in the evening, but I ended up not bothering. I woke up to Terezi shaking me – she was already dressed to go out, wearing a pair of jeans and the same kind of button-down shirt she always wore under her suits. I opened my bleary eyes and squinted at the clock.

“It’s ten,” Terezi said quickly. “Good time to start checking the bars.”

Time was a factor. Already down to a week, even. Problem was, none of us knew exactly what time Vriska was going to be killed on the 13th. Feeling around in the dark like this was never fun in the first place – and I didn’t typically know for sure that someone was gonna die at the end if I didn’t figure stuff out. It was a lot of pressure.

Once I was dressed, we took the Buick and went out to the part of town where all the working folks made their way after hours. One useful piece of information the papers had to say was that Trans-Southern had built a nice railway hub right through Austin sometime after the Alternians started showing up in force. The line ran up through Louisiana into Houston, then cut north through Austin before branching into a couple different paths north and south.

The working class district near the railyards reminded me a lot of Boston’s South End – I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing yet, but it definitely put us closer to the pulse of the city than if we hit the higher end establishments toward downtown. This whole section of North Austin was basically an extended community serving the railyards, which meant there was a good chance of finding information traveling through as regularly as migrant workers and transients.

First place on the list was creatively named “The Yardhouse” and was geographically closest to the railyards themselves. From the look of the folks heading inside, this was the place to go if you worked up a thirst doing honest labor all day. We were going to stick out like a couple of sore thumbs, but I’d been in worse places. We both had.

There was no bouncer at the door – it wasn’t that kind of place. So we strolled right on in, ignoring the assorted stares and whispered comments before finding our way to a table off to the side. Once we grabbed a couple beers from the bar and settled in, everyone stopped paying us much mind. We might still have a little bit of that copper air to us from our respective days on the force, but I imagined it had faded and changed into something a lot more world-weary and less concerned with potentially overhearing things of a possibly illegal nature.

After twenty minutes, we might as well have been invisible. The patrons kept up their conversations and their drinking. A group of them had gathered around the ratty-looking pool table in the far corner and were starting a heated-but-friendly argument over the specifics of a game none of them really knew the rules to.

I looked at Terezi, cocking my head – she shook hers in response.

“Nothing interesting. Lot of complaints about management and general talk about how shitty the company is. No big surprises there – I’m no Pinkerton, so I don’t care about workers raising a fuss...”

I was tempted to point out that the Pinkertons weren’t the Pinkertons anymore either. They’d tried to break up an Alternian strike in the 20s and that had gone badly to the tune of half of them being killed in an especially violent fashion. After that, the Pinkerton Detective Agency had been relegated to the world of dime-store novels.

I went to go grab another couple beers for us, taking the opportunity to scan the room while I did so. As I walked toward the bar, one fella in particular caught my eye – a fella in the back wearing a pair of sunglasses and a Stetson. Looked like he was looking right at me, so I nodded… but he didn’t nod back. Probably just my imagination that he was looking at me in the first place.

When I got back to the table and handed Terezi her beer, I sat down and said the only thing that’d been on my mind since we got there.

“You hear anything even a little bit useful yet?”

She shook her head, looking annoyed. “Not a damn thing.”

“Gosh darn!” I exclaimed, heatedly. “Why’d we talk about Trans-Southern like it was some big thing. Maybe we should’ve checked out something near the East Texas Water’s offices.”

After all, maybe we’d just been leaving out huge chunks of information when talking to June the last… the last time we did all this? It was so strange to get my head around – the whole idea that I’d been making decisions and then those decisions suddenly didn’t matter anymore because they just got wiped out and set back to be made all over again.

I looked around the bar again, hoping to notice someone of any interest.

While that curiosity would remain unsatisfied for the time, I did notice a trio of rough-looking boys in denim and plaid walking up to our table. They were, by turns, the short one, the thin one, and the giant one. Thin decided he was going to open his mouth first.

“Ladies! How are you this fine evening? May I care to buy y’all a drink?” He sounded like he’d already consumed a decent-enough amount of alcohol.

“No, we’re good,” I replied, gesturing to the beers we were still drinking.

“Oh, that’s no fun!” Thin said, placing a hand over his heart. “Breaks my heart to see two birds like y’all in this place with no company atall!” He slurred the last couple words together in a way that was a combination of accent and intoxication.

“I like the troll one here.” That was Giant – a hulking chunk of a man that reached a full head above Thin. “She’s real pretty with them nice horns.”

“Thanks,” Terezi said, her voice dropping down in pitch. “But we’re not interested.”

“Huh…” Short looked like he was contemplating something. “Never been with a troll gal before… wonder if it feels any different.”

Terezi was glaring. “I’m telling you…  _ y’all _ better move along now.”

Thin laughed. “I dunno, buddy – she looks like she’s pretty wild, y’know?”

Giant and Short joined in the merry laughter. That lasted for a couple seconds.

Right up until Terezi slammed an empty beer bottle directly into the side of Thin’s head. The bottle drew out a  _ crunch  _ that sounded like it’d done some damage. Thin staggered back, groaning. Terezi struck with the bottle again, this time hard enough to knock Thin to his knees. He swayed back, rolled his eyes, and collapsed on the floor.

Giant and Short were staring, wide-eyed, at Terezi. She was grinning and holding the bottle in her hand – I could see blood dripping from the brown glass.

“Oh, I’m  _ wild _ all right – you still wanna be with a troll gal?!” She flipped the bottle in the air.

Short decided that was his cue to let out a loud  _ “Fuck this shit!” _ and turned to run out of the bar.

The bar was now starting to take notice that someone had just been dropped like a sack of especially rotten potatoes right in the middle of things. Everyone was staring – the man in the Stetson had even stood up and walked over toward the bar. Terezi was grinning and hefting the bottle – daring Giant to make his move.

Apparently his size had meant he’d lived his life without acquiring any degree of wisdom, because Giant tried to fire a heck of a punch right at Terezi’s head.

She dodged around it with the grace of a practiced boxer and swiftly connected the bottle with the soft spot of his temple. Another sickening  _ crunch _ and Giant swayed backwards. Terezi shot back with her bottle-arm and went to go in for the final blow –

– the man in the Stetson was holding her arm and shaking his head.

“Ah think maybe it’s time to give this ol’ fella a bit of a break, yeah?” He spoke with a thick Texas drawl that I didn’t know enough about the regional accents to place. “Though ah do appreciate you not drawing that iron on him on account of his rudeness.”

The man in the Stetson cocked his chin down toward the Colt that was stowed in a holster at Terezi’s hip. He looked up toward Giant and glared.

“Get yer dumb fuckin’ ass outta here, you absolute piece of donkey shit.” Giant must’ve seen something in the man’s eyes that he didn’t especially care for, because he turned and staggered in the same general direction as Short.

“Let go of me, you ass! Who the hell do you think you are?!” Terezi was shouting and trying to twist away – Stetson was barely able to keep her under control and I knew it was a losing fight. The only reason he wasn’t unconscious already was he hadn’t taken a swing at her yet.

“Name’s Dave Strider, Texas Ranger – ah’d appreciate if y’all would maybe stop trying to hit me with a fuckin’ bottle, ma’am.”

_ Strider! _ That was a name I didn’t want to hear. I was hoping it was a coincidence – wasn’t something I was gonna be clearing up right away, but it was definitely staying near the top of my mind.

Terezi let the bottle drop out of her hand and pulled her arm away with a growl. “They started it.”

Dave shook his head, pushing up the brim of the Stetson. “Ah surely do agree – but y’all damn well  _ finished _ it!” He looked down at the unconscious form of Thin on the ground – well, I desperately hoped he was just unconscious because otherwise this wasn’t going to end well. I was pretty sure Texas took a dim view towards barroom murder, not matter how big of an asshole the victim was.

Dave knelt down next to Thin and put a hand to the side of his throat – he nodded.

“Good news is he’s not dead, and that’s a heck of a favor to y’all’s side of things.” He stood up and stretched.

“Now, way I see it, y’all got two options – either y’all can help me load this piece of rail trash into the back of my car and ah’ll have y’all follow me down to the station and ask you some questions…”

“What’s the other option?” I asked – I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get on the radar of the law so quickly. Hopefully he would propose an alternative solution – one where we stay off the record entirely, maybe in exchange for owing the coppers a favor or two to be collected in the future.

Dave laughed, as if he was sensing what I was thinking. “Oh, the other way is I cuff y’all, take your iron, and toss you in the back of the car and lock y’all up on account of the shit-show you decided to start here.”

On the balance, the first option sounded like it was probably the better of the two.


	4. Parallel Lines

**North Austin Ranger Station – Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/6/1938 (first derivative) _

The Ranger station was located at what I figured must be near the northern tip of the city limits, outside even where the railway company operated. It was a low brick building set off a dirt access road – only a small sign in front indicated that it was the northern Austin headquarters for the Texas Rangers. We pulled up outside behind Dave’s car and all got out – I helped haul our new friend from the bar inside.

Luckily for Terezi and I, the thin man with the predilection for making stupid decisions started to regain consciousness when we got him inside. He seemed coherent enough, given his experiences, so Dave slapped some bandages on the gash on the side of his head and tossed him in the drunk tank in the back of the station to cool off for the night.

The inside of the station consisted of a single, large-ish main room with a handful of offices off to the side and a set of four holding cells in the back. The main room was mostly empty, save for a couple of dusty old desks, and Dave ushered us into one of the offices off to the side and had us sit in a pair of chairs across from a heavy desk. After we all got formally introduced, he explained that we weren’t in any trouble – he’d do the paperwork but it was a clear case of self-defense. That seemed like it might be stretching the truth a little, but I appreciated the kindness.

He let us hold onto our pieces – I supposed that was a professional courtesy – and asked us to wait while he filled out a report on the desk. Setting his hat down on the edge of the desk, he took a seat and began to write.

Judging by the clock on the wall, it was just after midnight when he finally finished with the forms and looked up at the two of us. Dave narrowed his eyes and seemed to be deciding exactly how much trouble we were going to be.

“Y’all lucky it was me that stopped you,” he said in a voice that was remarkably calm under the circumstances. “Railway company folks woulda just beat you and left y’all to bleed out in an alley somewhere.”

I was getting the sense that maybe we’d walked into some history here, but I wasn’t going to say anything right away.

“Ah can tell from the accents and general willingness to start fights in a Company bar that y’all ain’t from around here, yeah?”

We shook our heads – Terezi spoke up.

“So… are you related to anyone who moved up north? A Dirk Strider, by any chance?”

I wasn’t expecting her to lead with that – I’d planned to maybe lead into that. I wasn’t sure how I was going to  _ do _ that but… well, Terezi had solved the problem for me.

Dave laughed. “Y’all gotta weird way of holding a conversation. But no… I don’t know any Dirk Strider, much less have one as a relation. Name’s common enough in certain parts down here – one of the main settling families was the Striders. Suppose I could have him as a distant cousin of sorts. Why do you ask?”

Terezi shrugged. “No reason – just curious if you knew someone we’d met up north.”

“Okay then,” Dave continued. “If y’all are done being silly, let’s get down to brass tacks – what in the ever-loving hell are y’all doing in this town startin’ fights in a damn rail company bar?”

I’ve discovered that there’s a certain feeling you get in your gut when you realize you’ve walked into something that’s well over your head. That sense that there’s not just history, but a whole damn legacy of a place that you don’t know a dang thing about. I was so used to knowing what was what – to understanding the ins and outs of the politics and the underworld. I think I had basically assumed that it wouldn’t be all that different down south – I’d just roll in with my decade or so of experience and that’d be just fine.

At that point I was rapidly realizing that maybe I was completely wrong about everything.

“What were you thinking?!” He directed that question specifically at Terezi, who smiled.

“I was  _ thinking _ that nobody gets to talk to me like that. They were being real jackasses.”

Dave raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. “I know that – ah saw the interaction between y’all before it turned into a goddamn one-sided fight. They’re lucky they didn’t get killed.”

I didn’t know much about Dave Strider yet, but the man was certainly perceptive. It was easy enough to underestimate Terezi – she was short and slight… and incredibly strong and agile in a way that was difficult to put into words.

“Damn right,” Terezi said with more than a trace of satisfaction in her voice. She was grinning, but Dave wasn’t smiling back.

“I’m serious. Y’all were lucky to not end up dead. I just happened to be in the bar at the time, and ah shudder to think what’ve happened if y’all were caught up by the railway.”

I interrupted – “You talk about the railway like they’re the coppers.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the comparison made – June had said basically the same thing.

“Might as well be!” Dave scoffed. “Railway owns half the damn town now – certainly everything north of the University. I guess they let the college folks have their fun – better for the public image and all that.” He shrugged.

I wasn’t liking where this was going. I already felt like I was completely outmatched by the scope of this case, and knowing that Trans-Southern was big enough to exert real influence over the entire city… that wasn’t making me feel any better. I was starting to wonder if there wasn’t a deeper reason why we hadn’t chosen to tell June more about this the last time around.

I wished I could remember it. I don’t think even June understood how her ability worked, exactly – but that didn’t stop me from desperately wishing I could remember at least a tidbit of what we’d been through before. After all, I had no way of knowing if we’d met Dave Strider the last time. Or if we’d even learned anything useful about the railway before it was too late. Did Vriska get killed because she was involved with them? Did she learn something she shouldn’t have?

Maybe it would be better to get her involved – to really go all-in and just explain to Vriska what was happening. It’s not like she wouldn’t believe us – she’d witnessed the effects of June’s power the same way all of us had. She knew better than anyone how terrified June was of what she could do, and how serious this had to be for her to be willing to risk using it again.

But maybe telling Vriska was going to make things worse, like June suspected. Maybe we’d even given that a try the last time – I had no way of knowing for sure. It didn’t  _ feel _ like the right answer, but I didn’t  _ know. _ All I could do was focus on what was right in front of me.

“You talk like you’re not too keen on the railway company,” I said. “Any particular reason why?”

Dave let out a short  _ hmph _ that wasn’t quite a laugh… but also wasn’t quite  _ not  _ a laugh.

“Are y’all fuckin’ joking? In case you haven’t noticed, this place is a little bit worse for the wear.” He gestured toward the dust-covered main room. “Used to be a full set of Rangers here – serve the whole northern area around Austin. Now it’s just me and a few others. Railway wants to come in and replace all of us with their own, but ah’ll be damned if I let some flatfoot-for-hire come in and tell me how to do my own damn job!”

The picture was definitely starting to become clearer, but I still needed to know more. I needed to understand the view from the ground or Terezi and I were likely to walk right into a nice, deep hole.

“What about the Alternians? Is there a Council down here?” I thought that Vriska had mentioned something once… at least about the trolls being down here.

“Oh sure,” Dave said, his tone sounding sarcastic. “There’s plenty of trolls down here. But there ain’t no  _ Council _ to speak of. Local Council in Austin is nothing more than a puppet and railway’s holding the strings. Y’all best be steering clear of them because anything said in their confidence goes right back up to their company masters.”

Another thread to tug on. Was Vriska in contact with the Council here? Had she tried to reach out to them? Did those “company masters” end up catching wind of what she was doing and have her killed?

“Who’s in the charge of them?” I asked. “Just for my own reference.”

“Y’all PI’s are all the same,” Dave said. “Always tryin’ to grab yourselves a little bit of the pie.”

He paused and reached over to pointlessly adjust his hat on the desk.

“Ah suppose there’s no real harm in it. One that’s in charge of the Council is a dame by the name of Feferi Peixes.”

That hit me – I knew that she was only related to Meenah Peixes by a peculiar coincidence, but it still hit me.

“She’s based outta a little club in South Austin,” Dave continued.

A sinking sensation settled in, right in the stomach.

“What’s the name of it?” I had a feeling I already knew the answer.

“Oh shit,” Dave paused for a minute. “Some damn gambling-themed name. They run a little casino outta the back room and no one asks many questions…”

He was thinking, but I already knew.

“That’s right!” Dave exclaimed. “The  _ Lucky Streak _ ! Stupidest name ah ever heard in my life.” He laughed.

I was wrong. I should’ve felt… I actually wasn’t sure what I should’ve felt. It wasn’t the club Vriska was going to die in, but I didn’t feel like that made things better. If anything, it just added another layer of complexity I needed to untangle. At this point I was feeling more exhausted than anything else. If you’d told me I could just drop the whole thing and be back in New York then I think I would’ve at least seriously considered the offer.

“One other thing,” I started – wasn’t sure where this was gonna lead, but I needed to at least ask it. “Do you know of a person named Mituna Captor? Pretty sure she’s an Alternian woman.”

Dave shrugged. “Hell if I know. There’s a lot of trolls in Austin. Just because the Council’s a shell doesn’t mean they ain’t around. Hell, railway employs hundreds of ‘em from the bottom to the top.”

We were just wasting time at that point. I was running ragged and Terezi wasn’t looking much better – we needed to get some sleep and use the morning to try to pick up some kind of trail. I had precious little to go on, but at least I finally felt like I was starting to get a general picture of what was happening.

That’s what I thought, anyway – it’s so easy to be wrong on these things.

* * *

**South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/6/1938 (first derivative) _

Terezi was unusually quiet on the drive back to our hotel. Matter of fact, she didn’t say a word until we’d gotten all the way back into the room. I was halfway to undressed for bed when she finally spoke up.

“So Dave’s definitely hiding something.” I was afraid that something like that was coming when she wasn’t talking in the car. I sighed.

“What’s up?” I asked. “Any idea what he’s hiding? Or at least whether it’s something we need to be worried about?”

Terezi’s face went thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t think he’s trying to hurt us… or Vriska, for that matter. I didn’t get the feeling that he was hostile or anything. Just that he doesn’t trust us and he’s into this more than he lets on. I got the sense that he doesn’t really trust anyone.”

It made sense, but I was too tired to deal with any of that right then. So instead of responding specifically, I just let out an exhausted groan and went to sit down on the bed.

Terezi sat down next to me and wrapped her arms around my waist – she was back in her underwear. Fortunately it was a lot cooler at one in the morning than it had been in the afternoon, so I put my hands on her hips.

With practiced ease, Terezi shifted her body and she was sitting in my lap, pressed up against me.

“Hey,” I said. “I ever tell you you’re pretty cute when you’re hitting bigots with a bottle?”

She laughed and leaned in to kiss me – I didn’t mind… her lips were soft. I let that feeling linger for a while.

“No, but I’ll take the compliment,” Terezi said when the kiss ended. She was leaning her forehead in against me. I could feel the heat off her body against mine – could feel her heart racing. Something was obviously bothering her.

“What’s wrong?” I asked – wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer, but knew I wasn’t going to be happy just leaving things alone.

“I don’t want this to all happen again,” she said. “After the last time – after the village…” she trailed off and I heard her breathing hitch for the briefest second. I’d only seen her like this a couple times before – my thoughts went to the scar on her side and the first time I’d seen her undressed.

“This feels so different than what we’re used to,” Terezi continued. “Even putting aside everything with June and… I guess we’ve lived all this at least once before? But even if that wasn’t a thing, this feels dangerous. It’s like if the New York Council had just kept growing.”

And that, I thought, was what made me the most nervous. Because in spite of its power and influence, the Council had been at least somewhat constrained by having to deal with the law. Trans-Southern Railway Corporation… they felt like the Council except that everything they were doing was within the law. They had the kind of power to actually  _ make _ the law.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “We’ll be careful. If it comes down to it, we can always just leave. Take June and Vriska with us, even. Just go back to New York and be done with this.”

Terezi was… shivering? Shaking? “I don’t think we can. I think these are the kind of people who could follow us right back up there. They could follow us and do whatever they want and… they’re like the Council but  _ worse _ . We can’t just run from them once they see us… or we can, but we’ll  _ always _ be running. Forever. If we stop – they’ll make us disappear. Jane…”

I was starting to cry – that was backwards. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t supposed to be the one getting all choked up. But I was crying and pressing my head against her shoulder.

“Jane, I can’t do that. I can’t lose you.” Terezi’s voice was quiet in my ear.

That was when I completely lost it – just started sobbing against Terezi’s shoulder. She had her arms wrapped around me and she was rubbing my back softly and I was completely falling apart. Because I’d spent all my adult life being the strong one – the one who was tough and capable and reliable and…

...it just wasn’t me, at heart. I was resilient, sure, but I wasn’t some hard-nosed tough.

“I’m sorry, Jane… I didn’t mean to…” Terezi sounded genuinely worried and I felt bad about that. I was trying to tell her it wasn’t her fault – I ended up grabbing her waist and pulling her into me.

I managed to get the crying under control enough to talk, at least. “It’s not you…” I squeezed her tight – pulled us together – didn’t want to let go.

“I don’t want to do this either. I don’t want to have to go up against another monster…”

I didn’t think we’d have a choice this time, though. I didn’t say that… didn’t say it because I didn’t have to. We already both knew that we were locked into this for the duration. Terezi was right – this wasn’t one we could run from. They’d find us no matter how far we ran.

I kept holding onto Terezi and she had her arms wrapped around under my arms and up onto my back. That was comforting, at least – I stopped sobbing and lay my head against her chest. I was starting to feel the calm return – my ability to think through this situation and figure out what the heck we were supposed to do to get out of it.

Right then, the thing I kept coming back to was wondering if we’d already had that exact same conversation before.


	5. Making Introductions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter has the word "queer" used as a slur - if this is triggering to you, please consider skipping the second half of the chapter after the break.

**The Lucky Streak - South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/6/1938 (first derivative) _

I wasn’t ready to talk to June again yet, but I was getting there. Running around in circles was frustrating enough on its own, but the idea that we were doing it with the clock ticking down in the background was making it a whole heck of a lot worse. Terezi and I agreed that it would be best to try to at least feel out whatever passed for the Council presence in the area. They might be in the pocket of whatever corporation currently ruled the roost, but at least the Council’s specific breed of corruption and iniquity was something we were both familiar with.

I knew one thing – if I saw Vriska anywhere near this place I was going to shoot the broad myself. Hopefully she knew better than to get involved in yet another mess like before. I thought she did, but the events of a week from then were casting a long shadow over my mind.

The Lucky Streak wasn’t going to be open for general business during the morning, but we knew from past experience that whoever was in charge would be there – and that was who we gave a darn about talking to. We were there for the information, not the nightlife.

We rolled the Buick up to the front of the club around eight in the morning – it would’ve been gaudy if the huge neon sign was lit up, but as it stood it was just a bit sad. I was getting sick of spending my time in clubs and bars and various dives… what was it about the assorted scum of the world that made them all gather together like that? The alcohol, most likely.

The door was, surprisingly, both unguarded and unlocked. We opened the door and walked inside. The interior was dim and cool – it fit the standard layout I’d come to expect with basically all of these kinds of places. I really was getting sick of them.

Whether or not the rumors about a casino operating out of the back room were true or not didn’t really matter, because I knew we’d found who we were looking for as soon as we got far enough in to see the bar. There was only person there – a troll who bore a striking resemblance to the one who’d tried to kill Vriska and I a few years back. I was glad Vriska wasn’t there with us – I was already bristling at the sight and I had a strong feeling Vriska would’ve just shot her on sight.

“You’re the ones who started the fight last night in the Railyard. The bar, that is, not the actual place.”

She was perched on the edge of a bar stool wearing a long, purple dress. A glass of some unknown alcohol was sitting in front of her – from the bottle off to the side it looked like she was drinking bourbon. Good choice – that was my own preferred medication from back in my heavy drinking days. Her hair was longer than Meenah’s had been, and not pulled into a braid, but the resemblance was still uncanny.

The glass was at her lips and she took a long drink before setting it back down on the bar. “I know who you both are. You weren’t exactly subtle back in New York… or Boston, for that matter. If you think you can get around like you two do and not build a reputation, you’re sorely mistaken.”

She looked up at us, her eyes glinting. “Crocker and Pyrope, Investigators, yes?”

“Actually, it’s Pyrope and Crocker,” I corrected.

Feferi – and there was no doubt about who we were talking to – laughed. “Do I look like I give a shit? Why’re you here – come to start another petty barroom brawl? Sorry, we don’t open for business until nine at night.”

She motioned towards the empty stools next to her. “Grab a seat if you want. Doesn’t matter.”

This wasn’t what I’d expected at all. My previous experiences with the Council higher-ups had put them as aloof, often-threatening figures who had a lot of power at their disposal – and they knew it. Even the ones who weren’t actively trying to kill us, like Porrim Maryam, had been menacing in a very real way.

Feferi felt… defeated. I took the stool closest to her and Terezi sat down next to me. Fefer shrugged and poured some of the bourbon from the bottle into her glass.

“I’d offer you some but… I don’t want to,” she said, taking another drink. “You already know who I am and I know who you two are, so we’ll skip the introductions. What the hell do you want?”

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. When Dave had described Feferi as basically a corporate puppet I’d still expected… I wasn’t sure. A little more agency? Instead, it was kind of like looking into a warped mirror of myself back in the early 30s. Just kind of wasting the days away.

Feferi took out a smoke on the end of a long holder and lit up.

Yeah, she was basically following my example to the letter – maybe classing it up a bit, but basically in the same position.

“How do you know about the fight?” Terezi asked, her nose twitching at the cigarette smoke. Feferi seemed to notice, because she blew a small cloud in Terezi’s direction, causing her to cough.

“Oh? Because this is  _ my _ town and word gets around.” She laughed, slapping the bar with a hand. “See? I’m a real gas when I get going. One of the railway stooges came in here right before we closed and told me about it. Told me exactly who you were – although I’ve already heard most of those stories through the whisper networks in the Council…”

She looked directly at me. “Is it true you gutted Meenah in her own office?”

My blood ran cold, but Feferi laughed.

“As if I give a shit! I knew what she was into. Literal children… and she tried to tell everyone that it wasn’t the same because trolls grow up faster!” Feferi laughed – she sounded like she was on the verge of being drunk, but far less than I would’ve guessed from the mostly-empty state of the bottle.

“Goddamn pedophile,” she said. She poured more bourbon. “I was glad when the whole lot of them died. Damara Megido or whoever the fuck – I don’t even care who did it.”

This sounded like something with history behind it, but it was well above my pay grade. I was going to try to steer things back on track.

“What can you tell me about the railway?” I asked, trying to sound as casual as I possibly could.  _ Tell me about your corporate puppet-masters _ seemed a bit on-the-nose.

She laughed again. “Ask me what you mean – am I just doing their bidding? You might as well. It’s not exactly a  _ secret _ that the Council down here is basically just the Company wearing a different suit.”

I was expecting to have to drag this out of her more than I was.

“Are you fucking with us?” Terezi asked. “This seems too easy.”

Feferi leaned forward, toward Terezi, and smiled slightly. “What… do… I… care? Everyone knows this. Besides, what’re a couple of out-of-town gumshoes going to do? Are you gonna come investigate me? Are you gonna investigate  _ the Company?! _ You’d be buried out in the West Texas desert faster than you can fucking blink.” She giggled – I guessed that last bit was particularly amusing.

Terezi put a hand on my shoulder. “Look, this is a waste of time. We already knew she was just kinda  _ here _ and that the Company is the power down here. Okay, great – breaking news. Let’s stop wasting time here.”

She was right, of course. And she knew Feferi was being honest with us or she would’ve pushed harder. There was only one other thing I needed to ask.

“Have you heard of a Mituna Captor?” I asked. It was probably a long shot, but what was the harm?

“Sure,” Feferi said, “she’s the bookkeeper that handles everything on the business side here. She’s out today but if you wanna meet her you can go fuck off…” She finished the sentence by downing what was left in her glass and slamming it down on the bar. “And I’m done talking to you two.”

* * *

“I am so sick of this absolute bullshit!” Terezi was fuming by the time we got back to the Buick and took our seats. “We’re gonna get run around – we’ve got a week to get this shit sorted. Less than a week now! Why didn’t we tell June  _ more?! _ ”

I shook my head, reaching down to start the car.

I heard movement behind me, and the soft  _ click _ of a gun’s safety switching off. My heart fired into overdrive and all of a sudden it became real hard to breathe.

“You broads move, you both die.” And that was a voice that meant business – the kind of gravel and ice behind it that I’d only heard a couple times before in my life. But if they wanted us dead, we’d have been dead before we knew anyone was there. Interestingly, that knowledge wasn’t really helping me to feel any calmer about the situation we were in.

“Pieces on the dash, ladies,” the voice commanded. “Slow-like or… you know.”

I took my revolver from the holster on my shoulder and slowly placed it in front of me – I could see Terezi doing the same with her Colt. Trying to stay calm – if they wanted us dead, we’d be dead. I kept telling it to myself over and over.

“Okay, now start the car and roll real slow around the corner, toward the back. Don’t get jumpy –”

I started the Buick and the engine roared to life. Slowly, I let the car follow along the road to the corner.

“Now turn right and head around the side of the building.” I turned the wheel and the Buick lurched around the corner.

“I ain’t here to make life hard for you. Quite the contrary… I’m here to make things nice and simple.”

When we were about halfway down the length of the Lucky Streak, the voice in the back started up again.

“Pull over to the side, shut the engine off, leave the keys.” I did what they said. Heart wanted to get out of my chest and start a new life on the run – I was struggling to at least  _ look _ calm.

“Okay, now you two get out on the passenger side and leave the pieces on the dash.” We slid over to the side and both got out – our new friend stepped out as well.

He was tall – a man easily over six feet with a long, thin frame. He wore a solid black suit over a black shirt and, of course, he had a black fedora on. To complete the look, the fedora shadowed the thin lines of scars up and down his face. He looked like something out of a crime picture. He was also holding a small nickel-plated semi-auto – I couldn’t quite place the make but it looked foreign to me.

“Again,” the man said with a slow smile. “This is purely a precaution. We don’t want you to be hurt or disappear without warning.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Terezi blurted out. The man  _ tsk-tsked _ her and shook his head.

“Such language from a pretty dame like yourself. You trolls are all so coarse.” He tipped his hat to us with his spare hand. “Ma’am and ma’am, my name is Diamonds Droog – I already know I’m in the presence of the esteemed Jane Crocker and Terezi Pyrope. Trust me, your names carry a lot of weight… even down here.”

Meanwhile, his name didn’t mean a dang thing to me. “Diamonds” was almost certainly an alias or a nickname, but none of it sounded even a little bit familiar. One thing I knew for sure though – this man wasn’t fooling around. He’d killed people before – probably for a lot less than whatever he was talking to us for.

“Okay, so what do you want with us?” I asked, trying for at least a little bit of tact. I wasn’t especially feeling it.

“Nice and simple,” Diamonds said. “We don’t care if you stay in town or leave town or whatever you do, but you don’t poke around the Council here and you don’t poke around Trans-Southern. We see you doing those things… we’re gonna have a longer and considerably less pleasant chat.”

He shrugged. “And that’s it! Nice and simple!”

Putting his gun away in its holster, he pointed down to the other end of the building. “You’re gonna walk all the way down there, do a slow count to sixty, then turn around and you can be on your merry way to do whatever you queer dames like to do.” I shuddered as he said it and glared, but I didn’t say anything – I wasn’t confident we could get to him before he drew iron on us.

So we started walking. About halfway down, Terezi leaned toward me and spoke in a low voice.

“He’s gone around the corner but he’s still close – give it a few minutes. He’s  _ fast _ .” Her voice was a combination of impressed and scared that I wasn’t liking one bit. If Terezi was worried about someone, then that meant I was dang sure gonna be worried as well.

We waited an extra couple slow counts to sixty, just to be on the safe side. Once we were done, we walked back to the Buick – our guns were still on the dash and the keys were still in the ignition. Back behind the wheel, I let out the breath I just then realized I’d been holding – I was shaking all over.

Terezi reached out and put a hand on my arm. “It’s okay, Jane… breathe in, breathe out. I’m here… we’re good.” I saw her putting the Colt back into its holster with her right hand even as she talked to me in a low, soothing voice. I’d seen what she could do with that 1911 of hers – it made me feel better to know she had it close at hand.

“Okay… okay…” I was still trying to calm myself down. It took a good five minutes before I felt anywhere approaching the land of normal again. Terezi had her hand on my arm the whole time.

“Okay.” I said it once more, feeling a lot more like myself. “What the fuck do we do now?”

I supposed we could just run – leave town. Or hunker down with June and Vriska and hope that everything would blow over. All of that would leave us in the clear as far as Diamonds Droog and whatever vague Company power he represented were concerned.

I also figured it would mean Vriska Serket would die in about a week.

On the plus side, it was still morning – we still had time to think of our next step.

In the end, it was Terezi who said the thing I was avoiding out of some misguided sense that it would somehow be the wrong thing to do.

“I hate to say this,” she said, “but we’ve gotta talk to Vriska now.”


	6. Cards on the Table

**The Paramount Theater - Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/6/1938 (first derivative) _

June didn’t want us to talk to Vriska, but it seemed like our other options had either run dry or turned inexplicably dangerous in a rapid fashion. But we needed to handle this delicately – we had a lot of different angles to worry about, especially now that Trans-Southern was apparently hiring serious muscle to look up on us.

We knew from Vriska’s last letter that she was going to be starring in a production of the new play “Gaslight” when it previewed in Austin. The main play wasn’t set to premiere in London until later in the year, but apparently the playwright was a huge Alternian culture buff and had approved an all-troll version of the play to preview in Austin and then travel throughout the South before making its way up North for the fall season.

Knowing that she would have to be there for cast rehearsal, and knowing that cast rehearsal ran every day from around ten in the morning until whenever they finished up… well, any cut-rate flatfoot could add the two numbers up and come out with the right answer. Terezi and I showed up at the Paramount Theater right after noon, hoping to catch the cast on their way back from lunch.

I would’ve been lying if I’d said that I didn’t feel nervous standing by back entrance to the theater, trying to decide if we should wait or just go inside. On one hand, I wasn’t the one who could roll the whole damn universe back and somehow remember everything like June could… but on the other hand she apparently hadn’t known much of anything about what was going on. And how much of that had changed from the way it was before?

I had no way to know. Maybe everything was fundamentally altered, or maybe it was exactly what we’d done before. Except I didn’t think so, because last time around we hadn’t been told that we’d been through all this before. That had to make some bit of difference, at least.

“We should go inside,” Terezi said, cutting into my introspection. She was right – there was no sense waiting – so we let ourselves in.

From the backstage, I could hear voices coming from the front – I recognized Vriska’s voice right away.

Where now shall I look?   
  
Where shall I look? The desk. Perhaps I put it in the desk.   
  
No... it is not there. How strange! But here is a letter. Here is a watch. And the grocery bill! See? I've found them at last.   
  
You see! But they don't help you, do they? And I am trying to help you, aren't I? To help you escape – but how can a mad woman help her husband to escape? What a pity.   
  
If I were not mad, whatever you have done, I could have pitied and protected you! But, because I am mad, I have hated you! ****__  
  
**** And, because I am mad, I am rejoicing in my heart -- without a shred of pity -- without a shred of regret – and I shall watch you die with glory in my heart!

I heard Vriska scream… and then someone – I assumed the director – was calling “stop!” from the front of the theater. Murmuring and a “good job, well done Ms. Serket – everyone take lunch and we’ll meet back at one.”

We walked out from behind the side-stage to see a collection of trolls meandering about on the stage. Vriska was standing in the center talking to a tall troll man with curved horns. The rest of the cast was filing out of the auditorium – mostly talking amongst themselves and not sparing us a second glance. Vriska looked over and happened to see us – her face broke into a smile and she patted her co-star on the shoulder and walked over to us.

Before I could say anything, I was caught up in a running hug – one that rolled over to somehow include Terezi. Vriska was squeezing us and laughing.

“Oh shit! When did you get here?! Why didn’t you say something?! Did you talk to June yet?! She’ll be so happy to see you!”

I wasn’t saying anything, and Vriska picked up on that because she let me go and stepped back, lines of worry across her face. I really hated that I had to have this conversation – wanted very much to not have it.

“Vriska, we really need to talk,” I said quietly – I didn’t want anyone to overhear. “Somewhere private.”

“I mean… what about over lunch? There’s a nice place near the theater…”

She looked at my face.

“Oh… like that, huh? Come on, my dressing room is in the back.”

Vriska led us through the backstage and into a short hallway with a few rooms off to the side. Her name was stencilled on one of them in black paint, and she held the door open as Terezi and I walked in. Closing and latching the door behind her, she turned to us.

“What’s going on? Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a social call.”

“It’s not,” I said. “You’re going to want to be sitting for this one.”

Vriska looked at me with a scowl and placed herself gingerly in a stool in front of a large mirror. There was a couch in the room that Terezi and I sat down in together.

“Okay, I’m sitting down,” Vriska said, glaring at us. “What’s going on?”

I wasn’t sure how I was going to open this up. Just lead into a story of a murder that was still several days off in the future? Her own murder, no less! Talk about the weird Company man who approached us and threatened to deal with us in an exceedingly unpleasant manner if we kept poking our noses around? What about the fact that June had apparently turned back the course of life itself multiple times?! There was so much ground to cover and I wasn’t even sure where to begin.

With the most outlandish thing, I supposed. That would get it out of the way. That didn’t make the knot in my guts untie itself any faster, but I supposed there really wasn’t another way about it.

“You’re going to die in a week, more-or-less. June’s already seen it happen a few times. I don’t know how many because we’ve apparently only been through this once. But whatever happened… it wasn’t enough.”

Vriska’s eyes were wide and her mouth was hanging slightly open. I realized that there was a wide gulf between understanding that something had the potential to be true and actually  _ knowing _ it was true.

“She… she said she wasn’t going to do that again,” Vriska sounded genuinely…  _ afraid _ was the closest I could find. He didn’t look upset, but she did look like she wanted nothing more than for this whole conversation to be an elaborate nightmare that she was about to wake up from.

I nodded. “I don’t know all the details, but I’m pretty sure she completely lost it when you got killed. She went looping back to try to save you, but it all kept happening. Then she brought us in and I guess we couldn’t help either.”

“How? How does it happen?” And that was a question not many folks got to ask – how, exactly, am I going to die?

“On the 13th of April in a place called the Royal Flush. You’re going to be shot in the head, according to June. She has no clue who did it…” I looked at Vriska – looked into her eyes. She had a strangely haunted look. After all, she was still processing the reality of this all.

“I don’t understand,” Vriska said. “I’ve never been to a place called the Royal Flush. And why would anyone shoot me?”

“You tell me.” I narrowed my eyes.

From Vriska’s expression, she was hurt. Not that I had no reason to suggest she might be involved in something untoward but… I felt bad for suggesting it when I saw her face.

“Fuck you, Crocker! I’ve been completely clean since we got here. I paid my respects to the local Council because otherwise they’d come looking for me – told them I was out and that I wasn’t going to make trouble.”

So she’d dealt with Feferi without trying to kill her… that was a start.

“They aren’t even a thing down here – the fucking railway corporation owns pretty much everything. Or companies with ties to them. Hell, East Texas Water and Mineral is one of this theater’s biggest sponsors! It’s just how it is down here – no Council presence which means no folks getting killed for nonsense.”

My mind went to Diamonds Droog and I wasn’t entirely sure that was true.

“So if you’re done being a goddamn bitch, can we either catch up for old times’ sake or you get the hell out so I can get something to eat and get ready to rehearse the last scene?”

I put a hand to my face and rubbed my chin thoughtfully. “Okay, I’m not calling you a liar. Has there been anyone unusual around the theater? Anyone making threats?”

“No!” Vriska exclaimed. “The only people being weird around here are you two!”

Which made sense, but there was something in Vriska’s face – she knew I was telling the truth about her own death. Because she’d already seen what June could do. Because there wasn’t another explanation she could jump to, no matter how much she wanted to. That conflict was playing out all over her expression – she wanted so badly to not believe me.

“You’re sure…” her voice trailed off and she stared into the mirror. “June definitely did this? This isn’t some weird joke or misunderstanding?”

“No, Vriska,” I said, my tone a little bit harsher than I expected – whatever, she needed to hear this. “We both believe June did this. Also, she’s exhausted. I don’t know how many times she turned things back before we came on board, but she looks like it’s hurting her. A lot.”

Vriska was trembling a little bit – just slightly, but I picked up on it. She must’ve noticed – she had lived with this woman for years.

“Yeah…” Still staring into the mirror, looking deep into her own reflection. “I did notice that. I asked her about it and she said she just wasn’t feeling well. Rough couple days at the office.”

“From our perspective, she probably seemed normal up until one or two days ago. I’m sure you’ll notice as the week goes on, but… I don’t know, Vriska. We were hoping you could tell us more.”

She let out a noise that sounded a little bit like a sob, a little bit like a cry of pain. “I don’t know! I believe you, but I can’t understand it!”

She sounded genuinely distressed – I supposed that the idea of facing her own mortality in a very real way was starting to fully sink in.

“Look,” I said quietly, “there’s only one way to make sure this doesn’t happen. You get to June and you tell her you know what’s going on. And then you take her and the two of you get the heck out of the city. Go lie low for a while. Just… just forget about this. Lie your way out of whatever obligations you have and get  _ out! _ ”

Vriska was trembling and staring hard into the mirror, but she nodded. “Okay.”

And that would have to be enough – it was the only play I could think of.


	7. Fold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: This chapter depicts a major character death.

**San Marcos, TX** **  
**_Thursday, 4/14/1938 (first derivative)_

I had the Buick up to 70 miles an hour, but it still didn’t feel fast enough. Not after June’s last call. She’d been panicking – been terrified. And when the line cut off and she said she’d call right back – but that was our cue to hit the road and drive as fast as we could. It was a good forty-five minutes down to the hotel in San Marcos she mentioned. We did it in thirty. Thank god for Vriska’s Buick being able to keep to a decent clip the whole way down.

“Fuck!” Terezi was telling from the passenger seat, checking the load in her Colt 1911. She holstered the gun and started wringing her hands together. “Fuck!”

The plan had actually worked remarkably well. Vriska had gone back to June and told her what happened. Then June had called us, hurt and upset that we’d said something – and we’d all sat down and talked. None of us could figure out _why_ anyone would want Vriska dead in the first place – at least no one who was both still alive and down in Texas. As far as anyone could tell, she was just an actress living in relative obscurity and under the radar of both the toothless local Council and the Company that apparently was the real power around here.

June and Vriska had eventually agreed to head out of town. They’d go down to San Marcos – far enough away to be out of the mess but close enough that we could get down there if needed. Terezi and I would stay in Austin and keep an eye on things.

This time, we made sure to tell June what little we’d found. The information about the Company, who Mituna was, and our brief encounter with Diamonds Droog. Of course, none of that even came remotely close to explaining why Vriska would be killed by anyone, but it was all we had to go on. June didn’t seem especially _happy_ with this, but she agreed that this was the best plan. She hadn’t tried this plan yet, so she didn’t know if it was destined for failure.

We did our best to keep a low profile while still poking around the edges of what we’d found out. I figured it’d be a bad idea to try to directly approach Mituna, so we staked her out for a bit – she was a creature of quiet habit so that wasn’t too hard. But after a couple days, she just disappeared and we had no way to trace her down without alerting the Company folks. At least we didn’t have to deal with another visit from Diamonds Droog… we thought that was a good thing. In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t.

The 13th had come and gone and Vriska was still alive. Terezi and I were breathing a collective sigh of relief. We went to bed that night feeling pretty good about ourselves.

And then on the morning of the 14th and we’d gotten a strange call from June – something about a car circling the block and she was worried. She called back again ten minutes later, scared out of her mind, saying the same car was driving around the hotel. She said she’d call back but we didn’t wait – we were already on our way.

I saw the hotel court coming up and pulled the Buick off the main road, rolling up next to the brilliantly white-washed building that shimmered in the late morning heat. June was in a room near the back – she’d given us the number before she and Vriska left.

I saw Vriska’s late-model Cadillac but nothing else out of the ordinary near the room, so I pulled the Buick up right next to Vriska’s car and cut the engine. Terezi and I stepped out, drawing our guns. This had a bad feeling all over it.

The door to the room was closed – I nodded to Terezi, who shook her head. She couldn’t hear anything from inside.

I looked down at the door… and my heart jumped. The edge of the door-frame was splintered. Someone had kicked it in. Motioning to Terezi, I slid to the side and raised a hand to count down.

_Three._

I raised my revolver.

_Two._

Terezi crouched next to the door, ready to go.

_One._

I lifted a foot and kicked hard right by the point where the latch joined the frame. The door blasted open – the latch must’ve already been broken – and Terezi was inside with her Colt up and at the ready.

It was dim inside – took a second for my eyes to get used to it after the brilliance of the outside. Terezi wasn’t under any such limitation – I heard her yelling as soon as she was through the door.

“What the fuck?!” She was screaming and running over. My eyes finally adjusted and I saw why she was screaming.

June was up against the far wall of the motel room, her eyes open and staring straight ahead. Lying in her arms was Vriska – with a single hole in the middle of her head – eyes unblinking. A wave of deja vu swept over me – the feeling nearly brought me to my knees!

I had no idea what to do. Terezi was already next to June, the Colt temporarily forgotten on the floor of the small single room.

“She’s still alive,” Terezi called to me. “She’s in shock!”

I saw June’s lips moving. I had already put my revolver away and had run up to kneel down next to Terezi. I carefully moved Vriska’s body to the side, trying desperately to gag down the urge to vomit. Cerulean blood covered June’s skin and stained her clothing. At least there was no sign that she’d been injured as well – a cold comfort that was.

“June, can you hear me?” I looked into her eyes and she looked back at me, not blinking at all.

She nodded.

“What happened?”

June shook her head – she tried to say something but wasn’t able to manage it.

“We’ve gotta get something done before the coppers show up,” Terezi was saying. “We can’t just be here like this.”

Two private eyes from way out-of-state in a roadside hotel with a dead broad? Yeah… I could see how that might be taken the wrong way.

“June?” I leaned forward and got close to her – she was trying to speak, but it was probably about the hardest thing in the world. “June? You gotta tell us what happened.”

“No time…” she was barely able to whisper it.

“What?”

She closed her eyes and I saw her face contort with pain.

And the world fell out from under me.

* * *

**South Austin, TX** **  
**_Wednesday, 4/6/1938 (second derivative)_

June didn’t want us to talk to Vriska, but it seemed like our other options had either run dry or turned inexplicably dangerous in a rapid fashion. But we needed to handle this delicately – we had a lot of different angles to worry about, especially now that Trans-Southern was apparently hiring serious muscle to look up on us.

Terezi and I finally made the decision to just go find Vriska and talk to her – it really seemed like the only option at this point. We knew that she was in the lead role in the Alternian-case preview of Gaslight that was rehearsing at the Paramount Theater, and we knew that rehearsals were happening today. So we’d run over to the theater, have a chat with Vriska, and see what we could find out. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the only thing we had.

I opened the door to our hotel room –

June was standing there in the hallway, glaring at us. This was unexpected.

“Really?!” She was practically yelling. “Get inside!”

I wasn’t used to June talking like this – she was normally pretty quiet. She sounded… tired. She looked even worse than when we’d met her in the diner – her eyes were sunken and her face looked drawn-out. It was like she’d somehow managed to not sleep for another week in the span of a day.

I backed into the room and June walked in after me, quickly looking around as if she were worried that someone followed her.

“June? What are you doing here?” I asked – I was getting that bad feeling and I wasn’t sure if it was just because we had been about to do something she’d asked us not to… or if it was because we’d already done it.

She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “You’re going to talk to Vriska. I know I asked you not to and I know why you think it’s a good idea… I’m begging you not to.”

If I didn’t know who she was or what she could do, this would be my _there’s no way you could know that_ moment. But that wasn’t true. I knew why she looked so much more haggard than the day before. Because Vriska had still died and we’d still had everything turned back.

But something about this didn’t add up.

“We talked to you yesterday and you said you had to reset things once… but you brought it all the way back to before we even showed up – so you could send your telegram and get us there. Why not roll everything back all the way again?”

The eyes I was looking down into were the eyes of a woman on the very last edges of her ability to cope with reality. “I can’t.”

“What the fuck do you mean?!” Terezi interjected. “How did you do it before?!”

“I mean, I can’t _anymore!_ I tried to turn things back all the way to when you both showed up in town and… I just hit a wall. I don’t think I can go back more than about a week. If it gets worse… maybe only a couple days. This is the absolute most I could do.”

“Oh hell,” I said. “How much did we tell you this time around?”

“More,” June said, looking a little bit relieved at being able to say. “I think this time it was just that you didn’t find much out. The thing is…”

She stopped. Tears were welling up in her eyes – she’d been trying so hard to hold it together and it just wasn’t happening anymore. June bent over and began to sob.

“I saw the man that killed her…” June said, her voice trailing off into a series of sobs. “I saw him shoot Vriska!”

My mind immediately flashed to the ice-cold killer face of the man who’d threatened Terezi and me.

“Diamonds Droog,” I said under my breath.

But June was shaking her head. “No… it was someone else… someone named Slick, I think. He wasn’t as tall as the one you described – maybe my height. He… he just burst right into the room and Vriska didn’t even get a chance to react. He told me… he told me to leave this alone. To leave the Company alone. To forget I’d ever seen anything…”

June was starting to shiver – almost _violently_. She looked like she was gonna be sick. “I can still see everything.”

Because to her, this had _all_ happened. She was the one who remembered all of it. No matter how many times she turned things back, to her it was still the same as if she’d lived every second of it. Over and over again.

How many times had she heard the news that Vriska had died? How many times had she _seen_ her lover die? How many times had she held Vriska’s rapidly cooling body in her arms? No wonder June was looking so much worse for the wear – she’d been forced to relive one of her worst nightmares constantly with the knowledge that if she just managed to get things right, maybe she could stop it… and it kept happening anyway.

“Something was different that time.” June had closed her eyes tightly. “I don’t know what it was, but Vriska got to the 14th this time and then… that was when that man found us in the hotel. That’s why I couldn’t turn it back any further.”

So we were going to have to live with certain consequences – the bar fight and the run-in with Dave Strider, Texas Ranger. The encounter with Diamonds Droog too… that wasn’t getting written out of the record. And maybe he wasn’t the one who killed Vriska the last time around, but he was certainly more than _capable_ of killing any of us.

Without warning, Terezi sat next to June and reached out to put her arms around the woman. Terezi whispered something softly in June’s ear and drew her close, clutching her back.

“...will do anything we can to help her,” Terezi was saying. I missed the first bit of it, but it was clear enough from context.

June let herself be hugged, her shoulders slumped.

“What are you going to do?” June asked, her voice muffled against Terezi’s shoulder. “I don’t want to lose her… not again.”

I thought on it a minute – we’d been spending so much time trying to avoid the problem. We’d been lying low and avoiding drawing the attention of the Company. We’d been so focused on not making waves that we basically knew nothing beyond the basic outline of what was even happening. It felt like there was something massive going on just beneath the surface, but the only clues we had as to what were vague and superficial. If that didn’t change, then Vriska would keep dying and we wouldn’t even know _why_.

A plan had begun to form in my mind – a way that we could at least be proactive in finding out more. We’d need local help, and there was only one person I could think of who might be both willing and able to provide it.

“We can’t run away from this,” I said. “We tried that in the most direct way possible. So we’re going to have to run toward it – to figure out what’s happening and how to step out of the way.”

June laughed – a sound devoid of any emotion beyond simple bitterness. “Oh yeah? And how’s that going to help anything? You gonna go to the Rangers and tell them your time-traveling friend is trying to save her gal from getting murdered in the future?”

“No,” I said quickly. “That would be absurd.” There was the ghost of a plan forming in my mind. It might not work… but it had at least a _chance_ of working.

I smiled, slowly. “We’re going to lie.”


	8. The Second Derivative

**North Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/6/1938 (second derivative) _

We’d only seen that part of town at night – and honestly taking in the scenery hadn’t exactly been at the top of our list of priorities. Rolling through during the day, I was struck by just how desolate everything looked. It wasn’t even the terrain – the hills and grassy expanses throughout the city were a vibrant green, dotted with flowers and trees. Overall, despite the heat, most of the Austin area looked quite pleasant.

Until you got to the expanse where the railway had begun to dig in. Arteries of black metal and faded wood stretched in from every direction, all moving toward the heart of the North Austin Railyard. Along the way were the minor organs that kept the whole system functioning – the switching posts and small substations and depots all along the line. We saw a number of heavy freight trains rumbling along the tracks – carrying a huge variety of cargo to points unknown. These were heavy diesel trains – nothing of the romantic view of the Old West steam engine remained in their efficient, looming forms.

The North Austin Ranger Station was set back a bit from all of the railway-induced desolation, but that just made it look lonelier. It was a sad little outcropping of barely-tended grass against a landscape that was withering under the pestilence of the diesel empire that had sprouted up around it.

We parked the Buick next to Dave’s car – the only other vehicle near the Ranger Station. So the idea of a skeleton crew consisted of a single man. That was discouraging, but it actually played fairly well into our plan. The fewer moving parts in this already long-shot idea, the better.

It was just Terezi and I – June had agree to go home and rest for the time being. She needed it, from what I could see. I didn’t even pretend to understand how her whole thing worked, but I did know a woman on the brink of complete exhaustion when I saw one.

Terezi and I stepped out into the burning Texas sun and walked inside the Ranger Station. It was stuffy inside, but at least being out of the sun brought the temperature down a little - like stepping from a blast furnace into a regular oven. From the door, I could see Dave sitting behind the desk in his office and doodling on a piece of paper. He saw us coming in and called out.

“What’re y’all doin’ back here?”

I took a minute before answering, because I had to do several things.

I had to lie to Dave about a few things – tactfully chosen – in order to get as much help as possible without him either getting tipped off to what we were really about or having us locked up for being insane.

I had to make sure he didn’t realize I was lying to him about anything.

And, probably most importantly, I had to make sure he wasn’t actually working on behalf of the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation in some way, be it officially or otherwise.

We waved and walked directly into his office.

“Can I ask you about something, Mr. Strider… something where discretion is important?” I raised an eyebrow.

Dave closed his eyes and inhaled sharply. When his eyes opened again, he looked annoyed. “Ma’am, y’all can ask me whatever you want. Ah can’t promise absolute discretion on account if you tell me about some illegal activity y’all are involved with then I’m obliged to lock you up for it.”

I shook my head as Terezi and I preemptively took our seats. “Oh no, nothing of the sort. As a matter of fact, I believe it’ll align most closely with your role as a public servant.”

Dave snorted. “Y’all sure ain’t been around here much. Ain’t nobody give a shit about public service in this place.”

“Be that as it may, I still have a professional obligation here.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

“See, I’m here on behalf of a client. An old friend, as a matter of fact – a Ms. Vriska Serket.”

“That name supposed to be familiar to me?” Dave asked. “Can’t say ah’ve heard of her.”

“She’s a local actress right now – playing the lead in the Alternian production of gaslight.”

Again, Dave shrugged. Not much of a man for the theater, I supposed.

“Well, prior to her current career, Ms. Serket was involved in an unfortunate string of… misunderstandings with the Councils of both New York City and Boston. She’s moved here to make a better life for herself and her… live-in female companion.”

“Y’all can just say it’s her gal, y’know. Ah’m not inexperienced with the concept.”

“Well, her and her gal are living in Austin now and trying to keep things quiet. So imagine their shock when an anonymous letter shows up one day making vague threats on their lives.” And now we’d reached the part of the conversation that was pure, unadulterated horse poop.

Dave frowned. “Threats like what? From who?”

“We don’t know. We suspect it might be connected to the local Council but don’t have any way of proving anything right now. The threats themselves were of a vague nature – right now simply advising Ms. Serket to mind her own business while in town and watch her back. We suspect the goal may be intimidation.”

“Yeah, that’s usually the goal of most threats,” Dave said, his voice flat. I ignored the sarcasm and continued.

“We were hoping that maybe you had some insight into who might be involved in the local Council.”

“Really?” Dave raised an eyebrow. “The local Council’s as toothless as a twenty-year-old hound dog. Feferi Peixes is in charge and she basically just sits in her club and drinks all day. Runs a little gambling operation out of the back room and everyone looks the other way because she mostly caters to Company folks. I already told y’all they’re the real power down here. Unless Ms. Serket made enemies of them, I think she’s likely just getting threats from a spurned fan of her theatrical work.”

Even though this whole scenario had been made up out of whole cloth, his dismissive tone was still getting on my nerves. What right did he have to wave aside someone like that?

“Another name came up in our research, if you don’t mind?”

“You mean the research that involves picking fights in bars, or something else?”

I ignored the jab – it wasn’t worth it. “Does the name Mituna Captor ring any particular bells?”

“Can’t say ah’ve heard of her much, but I do know her by name and reputation. Apparently she’s some kinda damn number genius that runs the books for the Council. That’s just going by what I’ve heard through the back channels – ah’ve never met the gal myself. Hear she’s kinda weird though – always walking around with a damn long coat on, even in the damn summer!”

It wasn’t much, but it was more than we had. I was about to thank the man for his time and get up to leave when he reached out and extended a hand as if to say  _ wait. _

Dave got up from his desk and walked quickly to the front door – I heard the  _ click _ of the lock and then he was back at the desk. He leaned in and spoke in a lower voice than before, as if someone could potentially overhear us in this empty police station.

“Y’all sure your friend Ms. Serket didn’t do something to piss off the Company?” He asked. Terezi and I looked at each other. The honest truth was that I didn’t know, so I shook my head.

“I wasn’t kidding about the Council here. All Feferi does is sit an’ drink her life away.”

I wasn’t going to say anything, but I knew he was right. We’d seen Feferi doing just that, and she definitely didn’t seem to give a darn whether or not someone was in or out with the Council.

Dave leaned closer. “The ones you gotta watch out for are the Company boys. Diamonds Droog and Spades Slick.”

_...someone named Slick. _ My eyes got a little wide and I really hoped Dave wouldn’t pick up on that.

“And… who are they?” I was trying desperately not to let the fear creep into my voice, but it was definitely there.

“Couple a’ Company rough boys is who they are!” Dave raised his voice just enough to show he really meant this. “Don’t think for one second I don’t know nothin’ about what goes on here, miss. Ah know the Company gets up to some bloody shit – y’all have no idea how bad they can be.”

I was willing to bet we had an idea, but I wasn’t in an arguing mood.

“So do you think these two might be threatening Ms. Serket, then?” I asked, still trying desperately to cling to the veneer of being the ignorant gumshoe.

“Sure, if that’s what you think. Makes more sense than thinking the Council had anything to do with it.” It wasn’t a very helpful answer.

But I knew it was all we were gonna get. So I thanked him for his time and we stood up and walked back out to the Buick.

* * *

**The Lucky Streak - South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/6/1938 (second derivative) _

We still weren’t exactly lousy with options, so Terezi and I talked it out and decided our best bet was to try to make contact with Mituna Captor. That was gonna be an especially tall order in light of having Diamonds Droog possibly looking over our shoulders, so we needed to think of a little bit of a plan.

The first step was to drive just outside of Austin and find a place to rent a car. Luckily we found a lot that was willing to let us take a Ford in exchange for a decent chunk of cash and leaving our Buick as collateral. With that out of the way, we made a couple stops to pick up food to last us at least through the day.

Our final stop, equipped with the food and anonymous vehicle, was the Lucky Streak. We arrived in the late afternoon and found an inconspicuous place to park where we could still observe anyone entering or leaving the club. Once we found the right spot, we shut off the car and settled in for a good old-fashioned stakeout. I would watch the door and Terezi would keep her senses open for any sign of Diamonds Droog – just in case.

When we saw Mituna – and a troll with a long coat on should stand out fairly easily given the hot weather – we would wait for her to come off of her shift in the back and trail her from there. Whenever possible, we would make contact with her discreetly and see if we could figure out another piece of the ever-increasing puzzle in front of us.

We both hunched down in the front seat, keeping ourselves as out-of-sight as possible. As we sat there, waiting for the long hours to tick down, I noticed that at some point Terezi and I had started holding hands.

It was hardly a romantic setting, but I appreciated the gesture. I’d be lying if I said that the whole reliving-my-own-existence thing wasn’t starting to get to me at least a little bit.

“Jane?”

“What’s up, doll?” I asked without looking over – kept my eyes on the club.

“You ever give any thought to… retiring from this?”

“I’m not sure.” I hadn’t really thought on it much. There were certainly times when I wished I could do something else. But I felt like, overall, the work we did was helping people.

“I’m not saying we don’t have a good thing going with what we do. But sometimes… I kinda wonder if we could just move somewhere and just be ourselves.”

That one hit me right in the gut and I wasn’t even sure exactly why. No, that wasn’t true – I had a pretty good idea why. Because I had wondered the same thing lately. Every time we sat down to eat together. Every time we spent the evening sitting quietly by the radio after a long day. Every time we touched or held hands or kissed. Every time we made love.

Working cases was wearing both of us out. No matter who we helped or how much good we were doing, we were still burning that candle at both ends. Sooner or later, it was going to catch up to us. Whether that meant some kind of breakdown or taking a bullet in an alley somewhere… it was a difference in degrees, not kinds. We would be out, one way or the other, and not in a pleasant way.

“Yeah, I’ve actually been thinking the same thing.”

I felt Terezi squeeze my hand. “We should take some time off after this. See how it feels. Get away somewhere.”

I felt like she had a point.  _ Time off _ … now that was a funny way to… 

Something in the back of my mind made a little clicking noise as it slid into place. I couldn’t quite see what it was yet, but there was something off here.

“June’s not telling us something.” I didn’t even know  _ why _ I thought this, but there was definitely something more.

“What?” Terezi sounded like she didn’t really believe me. “She hasn’t been lying about anything as far as I can tell… she just sounds exhausted all the time.”

I shook my head, still looking out the Ford’s window. “No… I don’t think she’s lying. I think there’s something else at play here.”

I was going to have to think on it. She’d been using her powers a lot, obviously. To try to save Vriska? Sure… but it felt like more than that. Or maybe the  _ more _ was connected to saving Vriska. It all felt like there was something else tying this whole thing together.

“You know what, forget it for now. I had this half-baked idea and the gosh darned thing just ran away from me.”

Terezi squeezed my hand again. “If you want to tell me later, please do.”

I barely had time to think about that, because at that moment a car pulled up in front of the Lucky Streak and a troll with long hair and a long overcoat stepped out. The car drove off and the troll in the overcoat walked into the club.

That is to say – Mituna Captor walked into the Lucky Streak.


	9. Keeping up Appearances

The next part of the stakeout was just as boring as the first, but with the added anticipation that came with knowing that Mituna had definitely arrived and would eventually be leaving, giving us an opportunity to follow her and, hopefully, get some answers.

I wanted to keep talking to Terezi – there were things on my mind that I wanted to go over. Things involving the case, for one – about how I felt like something was gumming up this case something fierce. June had said she had asked Vriska about her involvement with the Council or something like that – had said that she’d been looping back a few times to convince Vriska not to go to where her life ultimately ended. But it hadn’t mattered. And it hadn’t mattered when Vriska had fled because June had come back to warn them about that.

This all had a weird air of predestination to it. Except I didn’t believe in that – I believed that something had happened already that put things on the path they were now. Something that wasn’t fixed by some cosmic fate, but that was outside of June’s ability to turn things back. Something had happened further back than a week that had already put Vriska down this path. I didn’t have the clues to know what it was yet, but I knew it was there.

I’d talk to Terezi about it when we got done with this stakeout. It was all about waiting… and looking for the right moment.

Mituna Captor didn’t leave the building until it had already crossed over into the next day – about a half hour after one in the morning by my watch. That made it Thursday the 7th and June would only be able, at best, to turn things back until this morning – a fact that I was becoming increasingly aware of with every passing hour.

The same car that had dropped Mituna off rolled up after ten minutes and she got in. So I started the Ford and began to follow from a distance. We drove up and down empty streets heading into town. The closer we got to the downtown area and 6th street, the more people were around and the less likely we’d be immediately spotted once we had to start following on foot.

* * *

**6th Street, Austin, TX** **  
** _ Thursday, 4/7/1938 (second derivative) _

The car dropped Mituna off on 6th street and sped off, leaving us with the decision of trying to follow on foot or stick to the car. When we saw Mituna stop outside a small bar that hadn’t quite reached last call yet, I figured we’d park across the street and hang out to see what she did next. Cutting the engine, we hunkered down to wait again. Another stakeout – another chance to learn more or be bitterly disappointed again.

I kept coming back to the same thoughts – still trying to turn everything over in my mind. I didn’t know for sure that Vriska hadn’t returned to her old ways, but it felt… off. After everything she’d been through, I couldn’t see that being the explanation. I doubted that working as an actress had put her on anyone’s radar – that didn’t make any sense either.

And there was the sense that June knew more than she was saying – that wasn’t going away. She had never been involved in the kind of stuff Vriska had been. Vriska had been very intent on making sure that was the case. But… something had changed. June wasn’t the same as she’d been, because her experiences three years back had changed her. Even before she was forced to shoot Dirk, she had changed. Her time in the village… that had started things. What she could do – the power to alter the course of history. Even if it was only a week or so, that was power that no human could hold in their hands and remain unaffected.

And still, as I sat there and watched Mituna Captor stand next to a bar and wait for who-knew-what… at the end of the day, it all came down to the same things. The same motivations and the same basic wants and needs. I’d learned in the last decade that Alternians weren’t very different than humans when it came to those things. We all either wanted to protect the people we cared about, or we wanted to grab everything we could for ourselves.

I knew what kind of person June was – she would kill herself using her powers again and again before she saw Vriska dead. And no matter how much Vriska acted like self-interest was all she cared about, it was transparently false. She would die for June. Maybe she would die for someone or something else too…

Vriska.

Vriska Serket was walking down 6th street.

Vriska Serket stopped next to Mituna and the two were talking.

They walked into the bar together.

It was time to make a decision. Either we could sit there and continue to watch the bar – maybe trail either Mituna or Vriska when they left. Maybe we could figure out what was happening… figure out why Vriska was meeting someone in a bar who we thought had only a tangential relationship to this case. We’d mentioned Mituna to June… but what did she  _ mean? _

Did we mention Mituna first? I was getting the nagging back-of-my-head feeling. Something about how June’s whole  _ deal _ worked had that effect on me.

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because Terezi had already stepped out of the Ford. She loudly exclaimed “fuck it!” and walked directly toward the bar.

Dropping my train of thought completely, I hurried after her. The gal could  _ move _ and she was already across the street and to the door by the time I caught up. I put a hand out to catch her arm.

“Wait! What are you doing?”

Terezi shook her head and shrugged my hand off. “Jane, we need some answers. I’m done with this bullshit – I’m not gonna live through this again and again being played like a damn fiddle. Even if June means well… even if everything is just as simple as it seems, that isn’t fair. Why the fuck should someone else get to make decisions for me?”

This had hit a nerve that was red and raw for her – my mind went to the lines of scars on Terezi’s body. All the times she’d had her volition taken away from her. I felt like I could understand why she felt the way she did.

I didn’t try to stop her again – we pushed our way inside the bar and started looking for Vriska. It didn’t take long to find her – she and Mituna were in the back of the bar sitting together at a table. They were hunched in, engaged in a conversation that looked important.

Terezi wasn’t wasting any time. She strode up to the table with me trailing behind. As soon as she was there, she slammed a hand down.

“What the fuck are you hiding?” She asked, her face twitching with anger. “And what the fuck did you get into this time?!”

Vriska’s face was utter and complete confusion mixed with very real, very tangible guilt. She just sat there in stunned silence – it wasn’t something I’d seen much of from her. For once, she didn’t have anything witty or clever to snap back with.

Mituna, on the other hand, seemed to immediately collapse in on herself. She buried her head in her hands and groaned, pressing in on her temples. Vriska put out a hand, as if to steady her.

“It’s okay – it’s okay. They’re… old friends.” She shot a glare at us. “Although why they’re here I’m not entirely sure…”

“We need to have a talk,” I said – maybe that would work as a foil to Terezi’s more direct approach. “And I think it needs to include your new friend here.”

“Fine,” Vriska spat out. “Sit your asses down and try to keep the volume low enough you don’t attract all the attention in this damn joint.”

Vriska slid over and I sat down, while Terezi took her seat next to Mituna, who was still clutching her head.

“Is she… okay?” I asked, looking over at Mituna. She didn’t look especially okay.

“She gets bad headaches,” Vriska said softly, without further elaboration. I guessed it wasn’t exactly my business and didn’t prod any further.

“So do you two mind telling me what the fuck is going on?” Vriska snarled under her breath. “Because I thought you were continuing to live your life up in New York!”

“June asked us to come down,” I wasn’t quite sure yet how much of the whole story I was planning on sharing with her. It wasn’t like she didn’t know about what June could do but… Mituna was the unknown quantity here. “She’s worried about you.”

I was studying Vriska’s face, and I knew that Terezi would be paying close attention to everything I couldn’t see. A look of confusion, then concern washed over Vriska. Maybe June knew what Vriska was getting into, but maybe Vriska didn’t know that June knew. This was already getting a few more layers deep than I strictly wanted to.

“What… are you talking about?” Vriska was trying her best to sound calm. I caught a slight shake of the head from Terezi.

It was right then that I decided I didn’t give a damn anymore. In spite of myself and how I generally tried to approach most folks, I actually cared a lot about Vriska and June. And seeing June looking the way she did – seeing how much this was hurting her. If there was something I could do to stop this, then that was what I was going to do.

So no, we weren’t going to play nice and talk in floral euphemisms – we were going to come clean.

“You’re going to die in six days. Far as I know you’re going to be shot.”

Vriska stared at me, and for a second it looked like she was going to laugh. And then it was like she put all the pieces together all at once and I didn’t need to say anything at all.

“No… she can’t be…” I knew she was talking about June, so I nodded.

“Yes. And she’s done it a few times and it never makes a difference. I don’t know how much longer she can keep it up before she dies too, so why don’t you cut this nonsense and let us know what’s going on. You can start with why you’re here and who Mituna is, exactly.”

Mituna looked confused – she had lifted her head from her hands and was glancing between Vriska, me, and Terezi. From what she’d been hearing, I didn’t think she understood anywhere near the full meaning. The fact, for example, that when I said Vriska was going to be murdered in six days that I meant that as a kind of universally constant fact and not an abstract threat.

Vriska looked at Mituna for a second – she seemed to be weighing her options as far as telling us more and risking whatever was basically destined to happen and maybe trying to preserve some shred of someone else’s innocence.

“Fine. Mituna’s working for the Council runnin the books for The Lucky Streak’s backroom gambling operation…”

“We knew that already,” I said. “Feferi told us that much – it’s how we picked up your trail in this. Honestly we didn’t even expect to find you here at all – we were following Mituna.”

Mituna looked a little put off by this, and that was here right, but Vriska was shaking her head.

“That’s not it. Nobody cares about the Council in this town, or about some shitty back-alley gambling operation. The problem is that Mituna here has a real head for numbers – so much so that she’s ended up in deep running the off-the-books numbers for another interest… the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation.”

When I heard that, a nice icy chill ran its way all up and down my back.

“At first it was all just standard stuff – the Company didn’t want to pay taxes and such, so Mituna was helping them to hide assets and move money around. All very illegal, but… you know… she didn’t see anyone actually getting hurt by it.”

I wasn’t sure that was necessarily true, but I kept my mouth shut about it.

“People were still getting hurt.” – Mituna had cut in, interrupting Vriska. Her voice was soft and she sounded like she was in a lot of pain – like talking was costing her valuable energy. We all turned to her.

“I can speak for myself, Vriska,” she said. “I was afraid to say anything because I worried what they would do to me… but then… I started getting them asking me to move more and more money around. One day I was working on disguising the figures for a railway shipment and… I found a copy of an unedited note that had been prepared for one of the trains.”

She looked up at us, rubbing the bridge of her nose with a thumb and forefinger. “They were shipping a large number of guns out to Appalachia. I remembered seeing a story in the news about a strike in one of the coal mines there. And then… a few days later there was another story in the paper about how a group of rioting workers had attacked the mining company security and had been barely fought off. The story made it sound like the mining company were a bunch of heroes, but…”

Mituna’s eyes were starting to tear up. “The stuff in that train… it was like they were getting ready to start a war. There was no way the miners could’ve fought back against that.”

I thought that I remembered that story from three or four months back – she was right about how the papers made the mining company look. I’d always been suspicious that there was more than a little bit of yellow journalism at play there.

“I started keeping track of what they were asking me to do. All the money being moved around and the different shipments. I couldn’t usually figure out what was on the trains, but I started to notice that the destinations always seem to line up with strikes being put down or labor movements being sabotaged. I just kept quiet and started keeping records privately… and in my head. I’ve got a really good memory… it’s just… I get these headaches and it’s hard to concentrate so people usually think I’m an idiot.”

“Mituna…” I started to speak – wasn’t sure what to even say. “Was it you who got in touch with Vriska?”

“Yes, I was the one who contacted her,” she answered. “I knew about what happened back in New York because I always check the papers and try to remember important stuff. And I saw her name on the advertisements for Gaslight and made the connection.”

“Okay, but why contact her?” I asked.

“Because I thought she might know what to do with all the information I have, but also she probably wouldn’t be working for the Company. They have some very bad men who work for them – men who make the people they don’t like disappear.”

I thought of Diamonds Droog and the easy, casual way that he threatened Terezi and me. I thought of the name  _ Spades Slick _ and I didn’t even know him yet… and I felt like I really didn’t want to.

“When did you get in touch with Vriska for the first time?” I felt like we were coming up on an important answer now.

Mituna paused for a moment and pursed her lips before answering. “About two weeks ago, I think. Something like that.”

And that was it. That was why Vriska seemed doomed to be killed off no matter what June did – because the inciting incident wasn’t something she’d done in the past few days, or anytime in the next week. The thing that had put her in the crosshairs of Spades Slick or whoever else was involved in this had already happened two weeks ago.

I leaned forward, toward Mituna. “Listen, we’ve got to get you somewhere safe that we can talk for a bit. I promise we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe, but out in the open like this isn’t a good place to be.”

Mituna was nodding – she looked terrified, but under the circumstances I felt like that was probably a good thing.

“Oh shit!” Terezi was shouting, pulling her pistol from its holster, and standing up from the table all at once. “Get down!”

I barely had time to process what was happening when I heard the first gunshot and saw the cerulean mist fly as Vriska took a hit to the arm and went down hard, screaming as she tumbled under the table.

Grabbing my own revolver, I turned toward the door… and I saw him.

A man about June Egbert’s height, wearing an all-black suit and a black fedora hat, with a face that screamed  _ KILLER _ in every single scar-strewn crease.

I had time to think  _ Spades _ before he pointed a government-issue Colt 1911 at our table and started firing again.


	10. Internal Affairs

Thank God I had the sense to grab Mituna and haul her down with me as I went to the floor, because one of the bullets Spades fired hit her chair a second later, sending a shower of splinters into the air. Terezi had already turned and fired back twice, but neither shot connected. She grabbed Vriska, who was yelling  _ FUUUUUCK _ from under the table, and physically hauled her back.

I knocked the table over – it was solid enough to at least slow a couple more bullets down – but Spades kept firing and I dragged Mituna back with us, moving toward the back area of the bar where there was hopefully a way out.

Terezi fired at Spades again and he ducked behind a pillar in the bar, popping out to fire a few more times at us as we retreated. I had a moment of hope when I realized that he’s already spent the seven or eight rounds you could cram into a government Colt, but that faded instantly when I saw how quickly he dropped the spent magazine and loaded another into the gun.

Vriska was screaming – Mituna was screaming.

“Get them out the back!” Terezi yelled back at me. She fired the Colt twice more and kept the gun level at the pillar, not wanting to risk having to reload while we were still in danger.

I holstered my revolver and put an arm under Vriska’s shoulder – she was leaking blood all over my shirt, staining the fabric a brilliant cobalt. Mituna seemed to be unhurt, at least.

“Hey! We’re leaving! Get over here!” I shouted at Mituna – my ears were still ringing from the gunfire.

Half-dragging Vriska along I moved back behind the overturned table and around the side. There was a hallway that probably led to the kitchen in the back, and that meant a way out. Patrons were screaming and running out of the bar – the way back was clear.

I shouted something half-intelligible at Mituna – fortunately she took it for what it was and started running toward the door.

Spades poked out to take a shot at her, but Terezi was too fast and sent another shot that just barely missed his head, hitting the pillar and sending wood splinters flying into his face. Spades shouted and fell back behind the pillar.

I took that as my cue to heft Vriska up and follow Mituna. Another pair of gunshots and a  _ snap _ by my ear let me know that Spades had tried to take another shot. It was only a few feet to the hallway – as I crossed the distance I heard Terezi’s feet pounding on the wooden floor as she caught up with us.

A hail of gunfire came from behind us, hitting the doorframe. I turned back to see Spades in the middle of the floor, dropping another magazine from his pistol.

He already had another one. Terezi’s Colt had no magazine in it – she needed to reload – I could see her fumbling with a magazine that had stuck on her holster.

Spades had his mag in – everything was slowing down and I could see him reaching to release the pistol’s slide – it would only be a second now.

With one fluid motion, Terezi reached over, grabbed my revolver from the holster in her off-hand, and whipped it around to fire two shots at Spades. The first round missed, but the second hit him high in the thigh and he screamed and dropped his pistol.

Terezi was next to me, helping to lift Vriska up and follow Mituna down the hallway and into the kitchen area. The staff had already wisely decided to vacate through the back door, and that’s where we needed to go as well.

“Car’s right down the block…” Vriska managed to choke out. Her breathing was heavy and she was obviously in a lot of pain – most likely going into shock.

I called out to Mituna – “Hey, stay with us!”

She looked like she was pretty well on her way to shock too, but she at least kept it together enough to run back to the rest of us. She took Terezi’s place under Vriska’s arm, letting Terezi reload her Colt and hand me back my revolver.

“Can’t imagine the coppers will ignore this.” Terezi scrunched up her nose and swore under her breath. “Get Vriska to the damn car! Hurry!”

We stumbled off down the block with Terezi lagging behind. Another exchange of gunfire told me why she was worried – I glanced back to see Spades leaning on the wall of the alley we’d exited from. Terezi fired another shot that hit close enough that I couldn’t tell if Spades was hit or not, but he went down hard and that was plenty for me.

Terezi caught up and we all finished the trip down the block at a half-jog while supporting Vriska. Vriska’s Cadillac was parked at the side – we loaded her into the back and I got behind the wheel.

“Get something on that wound!” I yelled to the back. I saw Mituna take off her long coat and heard the  _ rip _ of the fabric being turned into a makeshift bandage. I pulled away from the curb, letting the powerful engine do its thing.

“Where are we supposed to go?” Mituna sounded on the verge of panic. “We can’t go to the Council – the Company will kill us!”

Luckily, I had an idea.

* * *

**North Austin Ranger Station – North Austin, TX** **  
** _ Thursday, 4/7/1938 (second derivative) _

The idea of driving right into the Company’s back yard for help seemed like a ridiculous idea at first, but when I thought it over, it was probably one of the last places they’d look. Or at least somewhere about halfway down the list. It would give us time to get Vriska’s injury tended to and figure out what to do.

I was also fairly sure that Dave wasn’t working for the Company. He seemed to resent the Company, bordering on outright hatred. I would take a non-enemy, even if he wasn’t going to actively help us.

Dave’s car was in the parking lot and, considering that it was probably coming up on two in the morning I was starting to wonder if he wasn’t just living in the Ranger Station. I hastily parked Vriska’s Cadillac and helped her out of the back – she was clearly not doing great. Despite our best efforts to stop the bleeding, she was still looking pale and drawn out. Terezi and I helped carry her into the station.

I had been only half-serious about thinking Dave was living in the station, but as soon as the door banged open, there was a scrambling from one of the spare offices and Dave emerged, clad in a set of pajamas and holding his service revolver. He took one look at Vriska and swore.

“Hole-y shit! Y’all get her over to that chair!” He pointed to a dusty chair in the main room and we brought Vriska over and helped her sit while Dave ran into another room and returned with a first aid bag.

Opening the bag, Dave retrieved rolls of bandages, a glass bottle of alcohol, a pair of forceps, and a wad of cotton.

“Okay, get that damn coat off her arm.” We undid the scraps of the coat that were serving as a makeshift bandage. Pulling out a pocket knife, Dave cut off the sleeve of Vriska’s shirt to reveal the bare skin beneath. The ragged bullet hole oozed cerulean blood. Dave squinted.

“It’s not the worst place to get shot…” He soaked the cotton in alcohol and began to carefully clean off the wound. “Looks like it caught the muscle but missed any major arteries. Which is good cause I dunno how y’all’s troll shit works.”

Vriska groaned with pain as Dave mopped up the blood.

“Oh, you hush up,” he said, setting down one blood-soaked piece of cotton and grabbing another to keep cleaning. “You’re lucky it went straight through without causing more damage. Few feet to the left and it would’ve taken out a heart or a lung… assuming y’all got those things in roughly the same place.”

Once all the blood was cleaned up, Dave began to check with the forceps – I assumed he was looking for fragments of bullet or clothing. He picked out a couple pieces of shirt and mopped at the wound again. Vriska had her teeth tightly grit and looked like she was trying not to scream.

When Dave seemed satisfied that the wound was clean enough, he took a roll of bandages and began to dress the wound, wrapping around and around the arm until there was a substantial layer of bandage. I could see the blue tinge leaking through, but overall it looked about as good as I imagined it was going to get.

Fishing into the first aid bag again, Dave took out a small glass bottle full of pills.

“Penicillin.” He handed the bottle to Vriska. “Take one every twelve hours until the bottle runs out. Drink a lot of water.”

Vriska groaned.

“Listen, miss –” Dave glared pointedly at her. “Ah was an Army medic for the better part of a decade. Just fuckin’ do what I tell you.”

She groaned again and leaned back into the chair. “June’s gonna fucking kill me…”

I turned to thank Dave for helping us, but he was standing there with his arms crossed, glaring at us. “I think the three of y’all better file into my office and get to fuckin’ talking now.”

* * *

It didn’t take long to get Dave caught up to where Terezi and I were, at least. But I realized very quickly that didn’t amount to much. Mituna knew a lot about the financials behind everything – at least in theory – but not a whole lot about any of the reasoning or planning behind it. Once Dave had heard what she had to say up to that point, he got real fidgety.

“What is it?” I asked. “I’m assuming there’s nothing you can do.”

He looked down toward the carpet. “Ma’am, I might be a Ranger but this office is a shell of what it once was. Company’s got their own security in place up here and the local law helps to fill in the gaps. Course, they’re all on the same payroll at the end of the day… but I never told you thank.”

I was seeing a kind of frustration in Dave’s face that I hadn’t seen before – and I was starting to wonder if maybe this was more personal for him than I’d thought before.

“Ah’m not seein’ the big picture here.” Dave knitted his eyebrows. “Why bother with all this? Shipping guns to strikebreakers? Like that’s even something anyone thinks twice about? The Company has more money than the Lord God himself – what do they need to be so subtle about this for?”

It was something, I’ll admit, that had crossed my mind as well. It all seemed so… unnecessary for Trans-Southern to sneak around about things that most people wouldn’t care about.

“Unless they bring down the wrath of the Feds… but ah don’t see that happening as long as they’re only targeting Communists and unions sympathizers and such.” He scratched his head and drummed his fingers on the desk. “Don’t make no sense is what it is.”

Mituna had been sitting quietly since she finished repeating everything from before, but she broke the silence with a short cough.

“Somethin’ on your mind, miss?” Dave asked.

Mituna’s voice was small and she avoided making eye contact with anyone. “I believe there is considerably more to this than some diverted funds to fund strikebreakers.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Dave said. “You got anything specific?”

She shook her head. “I’m kept away from anything specific. Everyone involved with everything is – nobody even knows who the head of the Company is. Everything is done through intermediaries and…”

She swallowed, heavily. It looked like she was starting to sweat.

“They have been checking on us more closely lately. I’ve also heard… rumors about how we should be careful around the railyards. It’s not a safe place to go wandering around unless you’re the right kind of Company person.”

“Well, ah’d say you’re definitely on their naughty list now, miss.” Dave closed his eyes and sighed. “Can’t promise much, but if you need someplace to hide out, I’ll let you sleep in one of the cells. I’ll leave it unlocked, of course.”

Mituna was shaking, but she smiled at that. “I’d like that.”

“Yeah – you stay until we can figure out what to do next. Not like I’m doin’ much else these days.” He looked up at me, then turned to Terezi, then back to me. “And what’re y’all plannin’ to do?”

There were things that were bothering me – things I needed to talk to June about. Things we all needed to sit down and have a long conversation about in general. And there was something else… an unsettling feeling that we were only scratching the very surface of this. Vriska’s impending murder had loomed so large in front of me – felt so dang  _ important. _ And of course it still was… but I was wondering if there was more to all of this. In fact, I felt pretty confident that there was definitely more. Vriska wasn’t important in any major way – and while I was becoming confident that she would be killed for talking to Mituna, that didn’t feel like the end of the story itself.

“We need to get Vriska back to her gal and talk a couple things over.”

I was about to get up to leave, but I paused.

“Uh… you’re not going to write this up, are you? The gunshot thing?”

Dave shrugged and looked around the room. “Funny y’all would say something like that, because I don’t recall witnessing anyone discharge a firearm anywhere near my presence. All I did was provide medical aid to an injured civilian with a hole in their arm.” He winked.

With a small smile, I thanked Dave and Terezi and I went to take Vriska home to June.


	11. Early Morning: Still and Quiet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This has some descriptions of light body horror (vomiting, cleaning off blood) - please be advised if these things are triggers for you.

**South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Thursday, 4/7/1938 (second derivative) _

The drive to the small house that Vriska and June shared in South Austin had been… quiet. Vriska took her first penicillin and promptly fell asleep in the back of the Cadillac, leaving Terezi and I up front with our thoughts. I think at that point we were mostly just trying to get our heads around what was happening more than anything else. It was becoming a common problem – seemed like whenever Vriska got involved the problems became exponentially more complicated. Not that it was even her fault, necessarily – the woman seemed to drag trouble around like a fishing net, picking up all kinds of issues in her wake.

It was sometimes hard to outrun your past, after all.

Except I got the feeling that wasn’t what was happening here. It didn’t feel right – Vriska was obviously trying to help Mituna. That felt like something we needed to talk about later. Pieces were scattered all over the place with no clear idea of how to put them together, and it still felt like so many were missing.

I glanced over at Terezi and from her expression I could tell she was having very similar thoughts. It could wait until we’d had a chance to sleep.

* * *

We walked up to the door of the house and it must’ve been three in the morning. I knocked…

June was already at the door, throwing it open. She saw Vriska and gasped – almost screamed.

“Oh my god!” She ran to Vriska and held her – Vriska tried to smile but she looked like it was still a bit out of her depth. June was sobbing and holding onto her gal and, honestly, it felt a little bit wrong to watch this. It felt so intensely… personal. I turned away and waited for them to walk past me and into the house. June was propping Vriska up, careful not to bump into her bandaged arm.

“I’m sorry…” Vriska said, half-coherent. “Sorry…”

“We can talk about it in the morning.” More sobbing.

It occurred to me that June wasn’t looking much better than Vriska – the combination of constantly rolling back everything that kept happening and staying up worried about her lover’s fate… that was obviously wearing on her. They both needed to sleep.

June turned back to us. “You can use the guest room at the end of the hall on the first floor. I don’t have extra clothes but there’s a bathroom with towels. I’m sorry… I have to help her.”

I nodded and June helped Vriska upstairs, the two of them struggling to make the steps without stumbling. Once they had retreated into the bedroom and shut the door, Terezi and I closed the front door behind us and made our way to the bedroom.

There was a bathroom right off the side of the bedroom.

I needed to use it. I was suddenly, keenly aware of the fact that I smelled like blood. I was covered in blood. Vriska’s blood… my stomach began to scream at me that  _ we did not like being covered in blood _ .

I ran into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. The first thing I did was lean over the toilet and vomit – the contents of my stomach churned and roiled as the acid burned my throat and landed inside the toilet with a disgusting liquid squelch. I retched until there was nothing left to come up.

I needed to get the blood off me. I quickly stripped out of my clothes, removing the blood-soaked shirt and tossing it to the far corner of the bathroom. Pants. Bra. Underwear. Everything smelled like Vriska’s blood. All of it went into the corner in a disgusting, cobalt-mired heap.

The bathroom had a shower – a modern convenience I was immensely thankful for in that moment. I stepped into the shower stall and turned on the water – the cold hit me and I jumped out of the way, waiting for the stream blasting from the showerhead to warm up. After a minute, I stepped back into the water.

It was hot – almost unbearably hot – but I stood there anyway. I let the jets of nearly-scalding water wash over me. As I looked down, the water trailing off my body was a brilliant primary blue… then faded to a silvery pastel… then finally ran clear.

I took the soap and brush that were in the tub and began to wash, meticulously scrubbing every inch of my body. I lathered the soap and washed my hair twice – until no traces of blue came trickling down. I scrubbed under my fingernails until the skin was red and starting to raw.

The cleansing ritual completed, I stood there in the water and let it wash over me.

I stood.

For a long time, I stood.

I couldn’t stand any longer.

I sat down in the tub and leaned up against the side, feeling the still-hot water hitting me in the face. The part of me that might’ve cared about that was so distant she might as well have never existed.

I sat.

I waited.

* * *

Time had passed, I thought. I wasn’t sure, but I heard someone knocking on the bathroom door… then the soft  _ click _ of the latch as it opened.

“Jane? Oh god!” Terezi’s voice. She ran up to the shower and shut off the water. I didn’t mind – it had run cold already.

The feel of a towel around my shoulders, the sound of Terezi’s voice in my ears.

“Just sit here and wait a minute. Oh god… Jane, are you okay?!”

I had enough energy to nod. “Fine…” I managed to mumble.

The towel was being rubbed on my skin, drying me off. The sensation stopped momentarily and I could feel Terezi leaning heavily into me… she was crying.

“Sorry…” My voice sounded hollow and distant. “I’m sorry about the mess…” I wasn’t even sure why I said it.

I felt a pair of strong, gray arms wrap under my shoulders and pull me up. Terezi helped me out of the tub and into the bedroom, leading me to sit down on the bed. I could see a set of pajamas on the bed.

“What?”

Terezi gestured to the pajamas. “I think they’re June’s.”

I nodded – my head felt surprisingly heavy. It was hard to keep my eyes open.

“Terezi?” I was…  _ hearing _ myself talk more than actually talking.

She turned toward me.

“Terezi… please don’t go away right now.” Distant – drifting.

The bed depressed as she sat next to me. I still had the towel draped over my shoulders but other than that, nothing – I was starting to shake in spite of the warmth of the night.

“Cold…” A shiver ran through me. “Please don’t go…”

Her arms were wrapped around my shoulders – her head leaning against my neck. She drew me in closer and I could smell her sweat up against the towel. But no blood… I couldn’t smell any blood.

I closed my eyes, drew in a ragged breath, held it… waited…

Terezi wasn’t moving. Wasn’t leaving me.

I let the breath out… felt my shoulders slump. Terezi was holding me close. I could feel her breathing softly up against me.

“It’s okay,” she said softly. “Not going anywhere.”

I was still shaking, but it was getting better. Running through my body in waves… every time it was a little bit less violent… a little bit further apart…

I could breathe normally again. Because this was all in my head…

As if that mattered to anyone.

“I can’t do this…” I said. “I can’t… I can’t  _ fucking _ do this.”

And I started to cry. My head was hurting and my throat was raw from vomiting. I was still shaking and starting to feel sore where I’d scrubbed so hard to remove the blood that… in all honesty probably hadn’t even all been there in the first place.

There was so much left that I couldn’t account for – things that I needed to talk to Vriska about. Even things I needed to talk to June about, because not everything was making sense to me and she was the only one who was able to keep a clear picture every time she reset everything. Except it seemed like she probably wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. I didn’t know if it would kill her to keep turning time back like that, but I couldn’t rule the possibility out.

All of us were falling apart. Even Terezi, as strong as she seemed on the outside…

“I’m sorry…” I said, reaching up to grasp one of Terezi’s hands and tucking it under my chin. “I’m so sorry…”

She brushed a cheek against mine and I could feel the warm moisture – all of us were falling apart… even if some of us were doing it more quietly than the others.

Terezi kissed me on the cheek. “Please don’t be sorry.”

“I don’t know if I can go through this again.” Trapped in a prison. Terezi and I wading out of the village through blood and carnage and madness. A shadowed figure stretching up to impossible heights and blotted out the sky.

Visions that would haunt us forever.

“I know,” Terezi said, quietly running a hand along my cheek.

“...please don’t go…” It was barely a whimper now – an almost-silent plea.

Terezi wrapped her arms around me again, holding me as tightly as she could. I leaned into that feeling – held it in my heart. We’d survived so much together. We could get through one more thing…

Just one more.


	12. On Your Own Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: This chapter includes consensual making-out toward the end (after the break). It is not explicit but if you find descriptions of sexual intimacy to be triggering, please use discretion.

Judging by the light, it was afternoon by the time I woke up. The bed was unfamiliar at first, but the memory of early morning hours came back with waking. I was in June and Vriska’s guest bedroom.

I was wearing the pajamas Terezi had set out. I didn’t remember putting those on, so she must’ve dressed me when I fell asleep.

It suddenly occurred to me that it was  _ afternoon _ and we were wasting time and I shot up in the bed, almost falling out. I scrambled to my feet and back back toward the door.

I stopped at the kitchen, and saw that everyone was inside. Vriska and Terezi were sitting at the table and June was at the counter pouring water from a pitcher into glasses.

June… laughed? She looked at me and laughed. “I forgot about those! I’m glad they fit you!”

I looked down at my pajamas… and suddenly began incredibly self-conscious when I realized I wasn’t wearing underwear beneath the pajama pants. Blushing, I slowly made my way into the kitchen and grabbed a seat next to Terez. Terezi had a full cup of coffee in front of her and was tapping her foot nervously, looking alert but a little bit keyed up. Vriska, sitting across the table, looked a lot better than she had earlier. A plate was sitting in front of her with the remains of a pile of eggs and some kind of meat. The color had returned to her face and she looked like she’d be a lot more capable of coherent conversation.

As I sat, Terezi leaned over and put a hand on my leg. “Are you… okay?”

I shook my head – there was no sense in being dishonest. “I’m not… but I’m better than I was before.” She squeezed my thigh.

June walked over with a plate covered in eggs, toast, and some kind of steak.

“Time to eat something,” she said, her voice not quite  _ cheery _ but also not upset. I think a lot had been on her mind lately. I wasn’t going to begrudge the opportunity to get something in my stomach after having thrown up most of what I’d had to eat the previous day, so I dug in.

“I’m going out to get you new clothes,” she said. “It’s the least I can do for you after what happened. Also, nobody knows that I’m connected to this.”

I wasn’t sure that was strictly true, but I didn’t think she was in any real danger. Not yet, anyway.

As June was walking to leave, Vriska reached out with her uninjured arm and brushed her hand. June stopped.

“June… please be careful,” Vriska said quietly. June looked down at her – for a moment I thought she was gonna be pissed. Instead, she smiled.

“I will – I love you,” she bent over and kissed Vriska on the lips, lingering for long enough that I turned away to give them a bit of space.

As soon as June was out the door, I turned to Vriska. I wanted to be mad – wanted to yell at her for whatever she was getting herself into. Wanted to scream.

But I couldn’t. After last night, I just looked at her, and said, quietly –

“I’m glad you’re still here.”

Whatever she’d been expecting from me, that was clearly not it. Her face seemed to cycle through a veritable rainbow of emotions before, finally, she landed on an expression of mild bewilderment.

“Uh… thanks, Crocker.” She smiled at me. “I’m… glad I’m still here too.”

“This is sweet but we never finished our conversation from before.” Terezi’s voice was low and even – she wasn’t mad at Vriska, but she was getting ready to be mad at  _ someone _ .

“I know.” Vriska grumbled. “You both need to know why Mituna approached me and what we were meeting about. Now more than ever, obviously.”

“You’re stalling.” Terezi again – sounding more annoyed. Vriska sighed… 

It’s not like I’m unknown in the Council scene. You don’t work for two different city’s Councils and get as involved as I was without folks knowing your name…

“Still stalling,” Terezi said, tapping her hands on the table. Vriska glared at her.

“Listen, I can’t just jump into it. It won’t make sense.”

“Fine,” Terezi finally relented and let Vriska continue.

Mituna was technically working as a bookkeeper for the Council – actually, technically she works as a bookkeeper for The Lucky Streak. Except she actually works in the back room doing accounting for the games and the numbers racket they run there.   
  
I’d say they use the club as a cover for that, but everyone knows about it and no one cares. Everyone knows that the Texas Councils are all toothless – the oil companies and the water companies and Trans-Southern and West Texas Rail – those are the real power out here.   
  
So Mituna’s real job is she does the accounting for Trans-Southern. But not their regular accounting – she’s the one who they use to move the numbers around when they need to hide things from the Feds. She’s in deep with the Company and has been for years. She might look tame, but that woman’s made of iron.   
  
Problem is, she found some stuff that looked real disturbing – not just moving money around to skip on taxes or shave a bit off the top. The thing she said about moving guns out to the strike-breakers… that was just part of it. She said there were suddenly more and more cargo shipments she was being asked to hide.

She came to me because she figured I’d be able to help… or put her in the direction of someone who could help.

Vriska paused and looked down at her hands, moving them nervously.

“That’s where everything really fell apart. I’d been meeting with her to try to figure out what to do with what she was telling me. The Company controls basically everything around here – how do you even fight against that?”

I wasn’t sure. The more she talked about it, the less hopeful I was at seeing any kind of long-term solution. Mostly I just wanted to make sure that Vriska didn’t end up getting murdered.

“Did June talk to you about… her thing?” I asked, feeling like I was vastly understating the importance of June’s abilities.

Vriska nodded. “Yes… I know about it. We talked a little bit before you got up. I know what she’s been doing and… I don’t want her to turn things back again. I think if she does it again…”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to finish. We’d all seen how June was looking – draw out, sunken-eyed, worn. Whatever twist of divine fate let her wind back the clock of fate, it was killing her to do it.

I wasn’t quite sure what the next play should be – I halfway considered talking to Terezi in private and cutting Vriska out of the decision entirely. But that wasn’t fair – she’d risked her own life to help someone in a bad situation without knowing her from Eve. It would be dishonest of me to pretend that this was some horrible thing Vriska had done catching up to her. No good deed, they say, goes unpunished.

“Gonna be honest here –” I looked from Terezi to Vriska. “I don’t see a good way out of this. Trans-Southern’s got a lot of resources and apparently at least one very pissed-off hitter on their side. Anyone have any ideas where to start?”

Vriska tapped the table and cleared her throat. “If I were you, I’d start by going back to The Lucky Streak. And I mean sometime when no one’s there - they probably have at least some records… speaking from experience. Find out who the contact is at Trans-Southern and then start working your way up the food chain.”

I mean, it had worked for Aradia Megido when she was hunting New York Council members – why not? I shrugged.

“Sure, sounds fine. We can go tonight… but what else? What are we supposed to do with Mituna?”

“Leave her with Ranger Dave,” Terezi said, chuckling slightly at  _ Ranger Dave _ .

“That’ll work too – he doesn’t seem to have any love lost for the Company. So…”

I was thinking – we had the bare bones of a plan forming here. We’d wait for tomorrow, sometime in the mid-morning after the club closed down and the cleaning was done. We’d be able to look for anything of interest without having to worry about being interrupted, and it’d still be several days until the deadline that kept popping up every time June looped things back. That’d give us time to regroup and figure out how to get inside whatever part of Trans-Southern we needed to.

I continued talking – “Terezi and I will head to The Lucky Streak this afternoon and come back with whatever we can find. Vriska… you stay here and don’t get killed!”

She started to speak, but then simply shrugged. And so we had a plan… or, at least, part of a plan.

* * *

Terezi and I left Vriska in the kitchen and went back to the guest bedroom – I felt like I really just needed to sit down for a minute. Or lie down, if this case was gonna end up running long. I had a strong feeling that it was.

I had just closed the door when I turned to see Terezi – her head cocked to the side and tears in her eyes. I was going to walk to the bed, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw her face.

“Jane…” voice quivering – she didn’t sound like she had even just a few minutes ago.

Two steps and she was right next to me. She reached out and put her arms around my waist. I could feel her touch right through the borrowed pajamas – hot and electric against my skin.

“After this… can we maybe not do this anymore?” She moved closer to me.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean can we stop working cases? Can we stop dealing with murder and getting into gunfights and coming back to wash someone else’s blood off and breaking down because…” She started to sob and pressed her head to my chest.

A loud sob. “I can’t do this anymore! I’m not made of fucking stone, Jane! And… seeing you in the bath this morning… I’ve been through a lot, but I can’t keep watching someone I care about suffer like that!”

My heart dropped and she was  _ so _ close to me now, sobbing – whimpering. I hadn’t expected this – even with all the outlandish things that were happening to us, this felt the furthest from reality.

“I just wanna go somewhere that no one knows us, Jane. Just move away and start over somewhere we can be free. Where we don’t have to watch out backs all the time and waiting for that one day when the next case will drop on us and… maybe this time’s the one we don’t come back from. Or maybe the one we just… we’re not the same anymore.”

She sobbed again and then… I wasn’t expecting it, but she leaned up and kissed the side of my jaw and that electric shock went off again.

“I don’t want that…” she was whispering. “I don’t want that to happen. I love you… I love you and I want you to be happy and I…”

Another sob. Another kiss. “I don’t want to see you in pain anymore!”

She was talking like she hadn’t been through the same hell I had. I looked down at her.

“Terezi, I don’t know what to…”

“Please tell me we’ll stop! I know what I am, Jane… what I’ve done. I don’t expect you to believe me but I want this to stop! I want to just… go somewhere quiet and live with you. Fucking… do anything!”

I cupped her chin in my hand – looked down at her.

“I believe you.” I kissed her, once, on the lips. She sniffled and leaned into my chest again.

“Oh thank god…” she trailed off. “Jane… I… I don’t know how to do all this.”

I could empathize. After all, most of my adult life had been defined by some variation of this. On the police force. As a private eye. Everything centered around the worst side of everything, and I was done with it.

I leaned in again – kissed her on the lips again – let it linger this time. There was at least one good thing to have come out of the pain I’d been through, and she was currently holding my waist and leaning me up against a door.

“I don’t know either,” I whispered back. “No clue.”

I was just making this whole thing up as I went along. No case I’d ever taken – no experience I’d ever had – had prepared me for something of this scope. Ever since the village, I had this lingering feeling that I was completely over my head. There was a world out there that was so vastly beyond my comprehension that I had no more ability to understand it than a mouse can understand the entirety of the vast country surrounding their hole.

Once more, I leaned in. This time, Terezi rocked forward to meet me, lightly biting my bottom lip. I felt her hands slide down my back and… very quickly remembered I didn’t have underwear on under the pajamas. I would’ve let out a noise but in the middle of kissing Terezi it was more of an audible intake of breath.

This wasn’t something I ever got used to… but for this it was in a good way. Never stopped feeling my heart racing when she touched me. Never stopped wanting that feeling to continue. Never stopped wanting her.

Never stopped loving her.

The other stuff… the violent, mean parts of my life. The parts where I questioned my own sanity more often than I wanted to admit.

I could leave all that behind and never look back.


	13. Company Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter depicts several major character deaths.

**The Lucky Streak - South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Friday, 4/8/1938 (second derivative) _

One half-day to rest up, some new clothes (at least June had good taste), and we were waiting outside The Lucky Streak for the last of the clean-up crew to leave so we could break into the joint and snoop.

One half-day to rest up, and then we were back at it. The more I did this, the more I hated it. The more I regretted that it wasn’t something that we were  _ choosing _ anymore. It was something we were doing because someone who I cared about was going to die if I didn’t. And yeah, I guess I  _ did _ care about Vriska Serket. She was charming in her own, somewhat rough way – and I knew I wasn’t exactly a delicate flower myself so that was a fair point in her direction.

And June cared about her, and that mattered to me too. In spite of myself, I’d started to feel like they were the sisters I’d never had. The slightly-mysterious older sister with the troubled past and good heart – and the still-naive younger sister…

Except June wasn’t anymore. She’d seen something that had changed her. Part of it was the same stuff we’d all seen… but there was more. She’d peered beyond a veil that few had and she kept peeking in, poking around the edges of something vast and terrible on a cosmic scale. A shadow that loomed over everything…

And maybe what June was doing wasn’t the same as the powers that Rose had tapped into, but somewhere deep in my gut I knew that wasn’t true. These were coming from a deep, dark place where everything ran together. Where space and time lost their meaning, and the human mind turned to madness.

“God what the hell is taking them so long?” Terezi’s frustrated exclamation broke into my depressing reverie, and I was grateful for it.

But she had a good point – the cleaning crew hadn’t come out yet. Of course, we hadn’t seen them go  _ in _ either, so maybe they just weren’t on today? That seemed unlikely.

“Maybe they snuck out the back?” I said, hopefully. I knew it was silly – we were gonna have to go in and hope that no one else was still there.

We stepped out of the car – we’d retrieved the Ford from 6th street the other day so as to have something a little less obvious than Vriska’s Cadillac – and walked right up to the back alley. If anyone saw us, we each had badges that would pass for a copper’s tin… at a glance, anyway.

The alley looked clear and the back door was closed, so it was likely that no one was there. Just to be on the safe side, I pulled my iron from my holster. If I was being honest, Terezi was the one who did most of the shooting – I just felt safer when I had my Smith and Wesson in my hand. I figured it was all in my head, but sometimes that was important.

Terezi tried the knob to the back door which was, of course, locked. So she reached into a pocket and pulled out a small set of lockpicks and went to work. Five minutes and I heard the  _ click _ of the lock and Terezi pulled it open. I noticed she’d already drawn her Colt from its holster.

We moved inside the back of the club – if I figured this right we could make a turn right into the back rooms and check for an office. Anywhere that might have records. It was dim, but someone had left most of the lights on – that was some comfort at least.

I heard Terezi sniff loudly, then heard her whisper to me. “Something’s wrong! I smell gunpowder… and blood!”

Nothing good ever started with that.

“Where?” I hissed. Terezi motioned to our right – toward the bar area where we’d spoken to Feferi the other day. Nodding, I let Terezi take the lead as we moved quietly down the corridor and out to the open floor where the bar was located.

There’s no need to pointlessly build tension – I say it pretty much immediately. Feferi Peixes was lying face-down in a pool of fuschia blood near the bar. I figured it was poetic that she’d died right where she’d been living lately.

Terezi smelled the air. “She’s been here since last night.”

Looking closer, I could see the single exit wound – left by a large-caliber handgun firing dum-dum rounds, most likely. She’d been shot in the front of the head at close-range. I wasn’t going to examine the body any closer – it wasn’t going to tell me anything I didn’t already know. I supposed it was probably Spades that did this – it had his name all over it.

I heard Terezi running toward the front of the club, then back.

“The door’s chained up in the front.”

So that was probably why we didn’t see the cleaning staff. Club was locked to keep anyone else out, because someone had business to attend to.

“Come on, let’s try to find the office,” I said. My stomach was turning sour again and I really didn’t want to throw up. The corridor went back and around a corner – Terezi still seemed real jumpy, smelling the air and looking around with her Colt held at the ready.

Around the corner, I saw why – Dave Strider, Texas Ranger and all-around tough guy, was slumped up against the wall. His head was bowed and I could make out the peeled-back hole in the back of the skull where the bullet had come tearing out. Blood had pooled up around him and begun to congeal, but it still looky sticky and wet in the dim lighting. The urge to vomit came back again – stronger this time – and I kept pushing on because there was nothing I could do at that point.

Why had Dave even been here? He’d been keeping Mituna safe, right? That had been the plan! I didn’t know what had happened in the last day, but it was something bad.

We took another corner that bent the hallway back and there was a door at the end. Only way to go – this had to be the back area. I kept my revolver up and pushed the door open, moving inside in a low crouch and keeping my head down. No one here – just a lot of tables for blackjack, craps, poker… all kinds of things. A single slot machine in the corner – probably rigged.

Toward the back there were some more doors, and the one in the far corner was left ajar. Moving as quietly as we could, Terezi and I cleared the gaming floor and got to the door – it was a solid slab of cheap-looking wood and a thin shaft of light painted a bright streak on the old carpeting by the door.

I nodded to Terezi and we hunched up, ready to make our move. This time Terezi went first, bursting through the door with her pistol up.

She recoiled and gagged, and I came through the doorway after her and saw it –

Mituna Captor lay dead on the floor. Obviously dead, given the identical head wound to the others. Single shot – front of the head.

I turned back and stumbled out of the room with Terezi closely behind me.

“God…” I started to retch – managed to hold it. “What the hell?!”

“We’ve gotta get her records,” Terezi was saying, leaning against the door frame. “If we don’t find  _ something _ in there then this is a waste and we’re not getting another chance. A dead Ranger? Law will be all over!”

Normally I’d be inclined to agree with her, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be the coppers who came calling on this one. Instead, I was picturing some Company goons who showed up and made all this disappear.

An idea struck me – a gut feeling so strong I couldn’t ignore it.

“We have to call June!”

“What? Why?”

“Just trust me!” I walked back into the office, trying desperately not to gag again. There was a phone on the desk – thank god it didn’t have blood on it. I picked up the phone and dialed June’s house – it took her a minute but she answered.

“Hello?” I heard the familiar voice on the other end. “Who is this?”

“June? It’s Jane, listen carefully.”

She didn’t interrupt, just said “I’m listening” and then went silent.

“We’re at The Lucky Break and Feferi, Mituna, and Dave are all dead. All shot in the head once. Remember that. I think it happened sometime last night. I have no idea why they were all here, but keep it all in mind…” I looked down at the desk – something caught my eye. A trident-head logo that seemed… familiar somehow. “Can you stay on the line?”

“Sure, Jane…” she trailed off, sounding worried.

I put the phone down and shuffled the papers on the desk around, picking up the one with the logo. It was letterhead that looked oddly… familiar.

As I read down, I realized why it looked so familiar. By the time I got to the signature line, my eyes were about the pop out of my head. Everything was making so much more sense… and becoming so much worse than I’d ever imagined was possible. I turned to tell Terezi what was happening, but I didn’t see her…

“Terezi? You gotta see this!”

Three gunshots in rapid succession, right outside the room. A loud  _ thump _ of something heavy falling over. I could hear June over the phone, screaming at us to tell her what was happening.

And Diamonds Droog appeared in the doorway, holding his little German pistol. He was shaking his head.

“I told you to leave. Woulda been real easy, you know?” He pointed the gun at me – I didn’t have time to go for my revolver.

“Wait one min–”

If June kept screaming after that – if anyone did anything else – I had no way of knowing. The last black curtain fell, and I didn’t know anything anymore.

* * *

**South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Thursday, 4/7/1938 (third derivative) _

Terezi and I were lying on the bed together. At some point the clothes had come off and we’d gotten to various activities of the sort you could engage in without clothes. It had been a generally good time, especially considering the circumstances. Having made the decision to wait for the next day to bother with The Lucky Streak felt like the right call. Mituna was safe with Dave and everything else could wait a day to give us the chance to rest.

Terezi was lying half on my chest, tracing her fingers up and down my stomach – I had one arm around her shoulder and the other at my side on the bed. She was so beautiful and this was so pleasant – I didn’t want this to end. No matter what happened, I was keeping my promise. This was it.

There was a loud knock on the door.

“Jane? Terezi?” June’s voice – she sounded worried… and  _ exhausted _ . Something was wrong.

“Yeah?” I called. “What’s wrong?”

“I need to talk to you…” Sounded like she was about to fall over. I got up quickly, pulling the pajamas on and giving Terezi a chance to cover herself with a sheet. I walked to the door and opened it.

June looked… she looked even more worn than before.

And in an instant, I knew why.

“What went wrong?” I asked, my voice starting to shake. “What happened?”

I let the door open and June walked in, her whole body shaking. “I got the clothes for you, Jane…”

She reeled, stumbled, and fainted.

* * *

Terezi and I had helped to carry her upstairs to her bedroom and Vriska had gotten her into a nightgown and brought some water. After about twenty minutes, June finally came to. Vriska made her drink a glass of water before she was allowed to do anything else, and a little bit of the color returned to her cheeks. Of course, she still looked a little bit too much like a walking corpse for my liking.

She was still shivering, but she seemed determined to talk to us, so I sat on the edge of the bed. Vriska was hovering over her, looking down and worrying.

“You turned things back again?” I asked – it wasn’t really hard to figure it out at this point. June nodded.

“Why?”

She closed her eyes and drew in her breath.

“You went to The Lucky Break like you said… but you called me from inside talking about how a bunch of people were dead… Mituna, Dave, and Feferi. I remember you said you thought it had happened the night before.”

I saw Vriska’s eyes grow wide. That meant it was going to happen  _ tonight! _

“And then I heard a bunch of gunshots on the phone and… I think you and Terezi were killed. I didn’t wait to find out for sure…”

She’d rolled things back on  _ my _ account? I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry,” June continued. “I don’t know anything else – that’s all you said.”

I narrowed my eyes. “June… think… is there  _ anything  _ else? No matter how minor?”

She lay there breathing heavily for a minute. “Yes… you called out to Terezi, said there was something important she needed to see. I don’t know what.”

“We’ve gotta get back there,” Terezi said, already headed for the door. “If Mituna and Dave were there… something went wrong.”

I agreed – something had gone terribly wrong. And I was gonna figure out what.

As I went to leave, I heard June once more.

“Jane… please be careful… I’m pretty sure…” She took a deep breath, trying to get the energy to keep speaking.

“Pretty sure I can’t set things back again.”


	14. The Third Derivative

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter contains somewhat graphic descriptions of gun violence and the depiction of a major character death.

**The Lucky Streak - South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Thursday, 4/7/1938 (third derivative) _

That feeling of deja vu got so strong by the time we pulled up to the side of the alley by The Lucky Streak that it nearly knocked me flat. We’d taken the Cadillac – didn’t want to waste the time going back to 6th to get the Ford we had rented. Another problem for another time.

This was where I died.

And I didn’t have any specific  _ reason _ to feel that way, outside of what June had told me. And she hadn’t known for sure.

But, for some reason, I felt like I did. And that was a feeling that was… oddly familiar. Being ripped back and forth in time without even realizing it. Or maybe that wasn’t the right way to see it, because June was the only one who ever seemed aware of what was happening. For the rest of us it was more like… everything just got set back. It was like the events had never happened in the first place – and June couldn’t wind the clock forward, only back.

Only to try again.

I shook the feeling off and stepped out of the car, my revolver already out. Terezi was next to me in a moment with her Colt. And this all felt familiar. And right. And wrong… all at once. It was hard to keep my head straight – even the knowledge that this had happened before was making that difficult.

The back door was locked – Terezi tried it and it wouldn’t budge. She reached into her jacket to pull out a set of lockpicks…

We didn’t have time for this. Clutching my revolver, I squared myself up and kicked the door solidly near the latch, breaking the mechanism away from the frame and sending the door flying open with a  _ bang _ against the inside wall. Terezi and I went inside, guns ready.

I saw Terezi sniffing the air, but she shook her head. Whatever was going to happen tonight, it hadn’t quite happened yet.

We made our way down the corridor, and I was struck by how  _ empty  _ it seemed in here. There should’ve at least been staff getting ready for the night.

A voice called from the right – toward the bar area. “Come in, then… I’ve been expecting you.”

It sounded like Feferi Peixes, the troll who ran the joint. Looking at Terezi, I shrugged and put away my gun. We rounded the corner to the bar…

And saw Feferi standing there, leaning against the bar, drink in hand. But when she saw us, her eyes widened in surprise.

“What? What’re you doing here?” Her tone was that of utter astonishment.

I narrowed my eyes. “You were expecting someone else, I take it?”

She… laughed? Why was she laughing? “I  _ expected _ that Spades was here for my reckoning.” She downed the glass in her hand in a single gulp. I still wasn’t sure how trolls processed alcohol but her speech was slurring just a little in a way that suggested this wasn’t her first drink tonight.

“I heard about the little show that you put on this morning. Why do you think I chained the front?”

I hadn’t even realized the front door  _ was _ chained.

“You two and the little cutie that runs the books for the Company… you got into it with Spades and now he’s running down his kill-in-case-of-emergency list… I figure I’m not far down the line.”

She turned to refill her drink and I looked around. No one was here – no Dave and no Mituna. Feferi would’ve said something. So either something had been so fundamentally altered by us choosing to show up early that they weren’t going to be here, or we were about to witness the prelude to the end of our lives.

“Have you heard from Mituna or anyone else?” I asked, still looking around.

“No, why? No one comes here except patrons and Company stooges anyway.”

“Oh forget this! Terezi, I need to go to the back and look around. Stay close and keep an ear out. I feel like we’re gonna see Dave and Mituna show up before Spades, but who knows.”

I looked right at Feferi. “Where’s Mituna’s office – I’m not in the mood for nonsense.”

Fefer shrugged. “Fuck if I care – I’m dead anyway. Back corner office in the gaming room. Have fun.” She downed another glass of liquor and refilled it.

Leaving her and Terezi in the barroom, I ran down the hall toward the back – around a couple of bends and back into the gaming room. Past the tables and to the door that Feferi had told me about. The room was closed and the lights were off, but it was unlocked – I opened the door and flipped the light switch, flooding the room with soft yellow light from a series of overhead bulbs.

The space was neatly organized, with a set of filing cabinets against the wall and a small work desk in one corner. The desk contained a telephone, a typewriter, and a few documents piled up. I had no idea where to even begin to look.

I was about to start combing through the filing cabinets when I noticed something – the documents on the desk were turned askance. Everything else in the room was so pointedly ordered that this seemed like an odd oversight. A  _ purposeful _ oversight.

The stack of documents was mostly unimportant nonsense about land title transfers, but there was a typed letter at the bottom. The letterhead contained a curious trident-head logo that looked oddly familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I picked up the letter.

Ms. Peixes,   
  
Ms. Captor will be coming in-house to work directly under me and my staff on a variety of special projects. As our progress is well ahead of schedule and I need her to be more accessible.   
  
You will have two weeks to find a suitable replacement. Whether you do or not, Ms. Captor will start work with me on 4/11/1938.   
  
You may direct any questions through my secretary. Please do be mindful of the fact that this is not a request.

I scanned the brief letter until my eyes landed on the signature.

_ I had called out to Terezi – told her there was something important for her to see. _

I instantly knew what it was – the signature line had a name that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

_ Dr. Elizabeth Crocker _

I ran back to the bar, clutching the letter in my hands. As I came around the last corner, I saw Dave Strider and Mituna Captor standing there, glaring at Terezi and Feferi.

The gang was all here.

Dave turned to me. “What’re y’all doing here?”

“I could ask you the very same question. Mituna –” I looked right at the troll. “We need to go right now and I need to ask you some very specific questions.”

“Now hold on just one damn minute!” Dave interrupted. I raised a hand.

“Mr. Strider, with all due respect, time is kind of a factor here.” I had my revolver away but I was nervously scanning the room.

Terezi suddenly interrupted – “Did you close the back door when you came in?”

Dave looked confused. “Yeah, why?”

She drew her Colt from the holster at her hip and ran behind the bar. I immediately followed after.

“Get down!” Terezi shouted – Mituna threw herself flat to the floor and Dave drew his own service revolver while crouching down.

A second later, I saw a black-clad leg come around the corner and Spades Slick was standing in the doorway, holding his revolver.

There was a barrage of gunshots and I had no idea who was firing – Spades fired at least a couple rounds and Terezi was firing at him and Dave was firing at  _ something _ .

If it weren’t for Terezi, I think Feferi would’ve died outright – instead, a round just barely missed her and hit the side of the bar. She dove behind next to Terezi.

The round that Terezi fired had found its mark – because Spades took a hit in the gun arm and went down to the floor, hard. He was bleeding everywhere and yelling – not screaming in pain, but  _ yelling _ with rage.

Dave got up and strode over to Spades, his revolver aimed at the black-clad man in the fedora the whole time.

“What in the hell are y’all doin’? Who the fuck are ya workin’ for?!” Dave was yelling and holding the gun in Spades’ face – but he wasn’t watching his left hand.

I yelled.

Terezi fired a shot.

Spades’ head took the full force of the heavy bullet and collapsed like a piece of overripe fruit, blasting blood and viscera out the side. Dave turned and yelled.

“WHAT THE HELL?!”

I was already up and running, sliding along the floor and coming to a stop next to Spades’ still-twitching body. His left hand was still clutching the hold-out piece that he’d been reaching for. Thank god Terezi was so god-damn quick.

Dave looked over and saw the small pistol in Spades’ hand – his face turned green and he promptly turned and threw up on the floor. Guess he finally realized how close he’d come to death.

“We don’t have time for this!” I was shouting. “There’s another one of these assholes coming and we don’t want to be here when he gets in!”

And how did I know that? An educated guess – call it a hunch. Call it a premonition… or a past life. But whatever the case, I knew that Diamonds Droog was still out there. And despite Spades’ reputation, I had the sinking feeling that Diamonds was the worse of the two.

“Get Feferi and get her the heck out of here,” I was gesturing at Dave. “We’ll take Mituna and get her somewhere safe.”

I was thinking about Vriska’s distinctive Cadillac parked right outside – hoping that Diamonds wasn’t about to show up.

“What about the office?” Terezi asked. “Did you find anything?”

I could feel myself starting to shake. “I found enough.”

* * *

I got us a couple miles away before we pulled over. We needed to head back to June’s place, but first I needed to talk to everyone. Specifically, I needed to talk to Mituna – but I figured it was important for Terezi to hear too.

As soon as I pulled the Cadillac off onto a side street, I turned to Mituna, who’d been sitting quietly in a kind of daze in the back seat.

“Do you know who you’re working for?” I asked bluntly. “The woman who sent that letter to you.”

She knew exactly what I was talking about – I could see it spark in her eyes. She nodded.

“Yes… but…” She glanced off to the side. “I mean, I know her name, but I don’t know  _ who _ she is.”

“Tell me what you mean. Tell me what you know about who’s signing your dang paychecks!”

“The Trans-Southern Railway Corporation… well, not exactly… everything gets passed through one of their affiliates. A company called East Texas Water and Mineral Rights.”

Recognition flared in my mind – of course the two companies were connected. Why wouldn’t they be. As soon as I saw the name on that letter I knew exactly what was happening here. I knew exactly how big this was – how afraid we should really be.”

“What else? Now’s not a good time to leave information out!” I think I might’ve been close to shouting.

Mituna shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “I don’t know! I know that East Texas signs my checks but everyone knows I’m working for Trans-Southern! I just… move numbers around. Make money go from one account to another. I’ve always had a talent for it – they say my blood color used to work with math and stuff all the time – that we’re naturally gifted at it. That’s all I do! I just move numbers!”

“Why’d you go to Vriska, then?”

She sniffled, took a ragged breath. “Because… I realized that the numbers might be hurting people. With the strike-breakers… but… I think there’s more. So much activity, there has to be more. And they keep it so well-hidden!”

She stared at me, hard. “I don’t understand! I know this is bad, but why did you get so worried when you saw that letter? It’s just from some random executive at the Company!”

I shook my head, and I could feel the tears behind my own eyes. Something that I’d tried to run from for more than ten years. Something I thought I’d left back East that would never come back to find me. Something I couldn’t avoid facing any longer.

“It’s not some random executive… I think it’s the person at the very top…” I paused, tried to collect myself… I was failing.

“Elizabeth Crocker…” I said the name, hating every syllable in it. Hating every memory that it invoked. Hating it with every fiber of my very being.

“Elizabeth Crocker is my mother.”


	15. Filling in the Gaps

They say that money begets money and power begets power. In my experience, those aren’t just true in specific cases – those are universal truths. It’s also been my experience that those in power will do almost anything to remain that way. And so individual wealth builds families builds dynasties.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the Crocker dynasty began in earnest, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it likely goes back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. My family history puts the most sanitized version of the thing out there – they were involved in the merchant exchanges of the day. Trading various commodities back and forth and building a fortune off of it.

What they fail to mention is that the most lucrative of those commodities were human lives. The Black bodies they treated as nothing more than interchangeable sources of cheap labor – bought and paid for like animals and then held in perpetuity for their own use. However they saw fit.

Of course, the slave trade eventually fell out of fashion – especially for a Northern neo-aristocratic family like the Crockers, so they quietly divested their interests ahead of the Civil War. The Crockers were smart enough to see the looming storm clouds and understand what they meant. They were smart enough to know that the South had no chance of winning the day against the industrial might of the North.

See, the Crockers didn’t build their fortunes on the labor of those slaves – they built it on the pure TRADE of it. And when that trade looked like it might no longer make them a profit, they stopped. Not out of even the barest shred of decency or morality, but purely because it didn’t make good business sense anymore.

And they invested in industry – heavily. In the power of the steam engine. In the might of the railroads. In textiles and production facilities in the North. In making everything that modern industrial society required to function, and in providing the means to get everything from one point to another.

Where the end of the Civil War brought ruin to the South, the Crockers saw another opportunity. They stepped in to provide the means to rebuild… for a price. Where the Black workers of the plantations had once been a source of free labor that they had divested from when slavery was no longer in fashion, now the Crockers had the morally dubious honor of “employing” the same Black folks in the loosest sense of the word. The Crockers paid them next to nothing and worked them to break in order to continue to expand their rail empire.

When the Alternians appeared, the Crockers saw another opportunity. Here were a people who had little knowledge of the Earth and its customs and politics. A field ripe with another base of potential consumers.

But the Alternians had their own way of doing things – and the Crockers didn’t understand it. But they did understand manipulation, so they faded into the background and began to make themselves obscure.

So Crocker Industries became Northeast Industrial, and Carolina Atlantic, and Trans-Southern Railway Corporation, and Atlantic Armaments – all under the enigmatic guidance of the Crocker Corporation. I say this with full knowledge after the fact – I was largely insulated from the exact specifics of the Crocker Corporation and how it operated.

Because to the Crockers, nothing made more sense than profit. And nothing generated more profit than warfare. They’d seen the conflict around the Civil War not as a hindrance, but as a chance to make more money. While they were late to that particular ball, they had promised themselves that it wouldn’t happen again.

Rumblings of war in Europe grew louder and louder and the various Crocker companies began gearing up for war.

By this time, the aging head of the Crocker Corporation, a cruel man named Thomas Crocker, had passed control along to his daughter Elizabeth Crocker – known as “Betty” to her friends, of whom she had few. She was married to a slip of a man – Eugene Crocker – and had given birth to a baby girl. This is where I came into the picture – a bundle of joy named Jane Crocker.

I came into things right before the Crocker Corporation’s dreams of wartime profits started to fizzle and die. After all, the Alternians had stopped a major assassination plot in Europe and become the darlings of the whole place. What would’ve certainly erupted into a firestorm simply turned into the usual back-and-forth squabbling, and the addition of the Alternians made things considerably more complex.

I grew up in an environment that was privileged beyond many people’s wildest dreams. My father died when I was very young (under circumstances that remain unexplained to this day) and so I grew up as the presumed heir to the Crocker Corporation when I came into my own and my mother decided to step down and enjoy a life of retired luxury. In the meantime, my every whim was catered to as an army of servants raised me. Even when my mother remarried to an equally docile man who she could control, she was my primary parental figure and even that was only in the sense that she provided a kind of general oversight without really being involved.

Every need I had was provided for, save one – my need for some kind of individual identity. Because when you’re a Crocker, you’re a Crocker. I was taught from a very young age to be exactly who I needed to be at any given time, and that often meant sacrificing everything about myself in exchange for my family legacy.

When I was still a child, I was taught not only in the various subjects that formed the basis of a classical European education, but also in the aspects of the Crocker business that I would be expected to eventually take over. So by the age of thirteen I not only knew a decent amount of Latin, but also knew how to balance a corporate ledger with a fair degree of proficiency.

And there’s where my fortune starts to part ways from the Crocker fortune. Because when I started to hit the age where I showed an interest in boys, I also found that I was showing a strong interest in GIRLS. If anything, I’d say that my interest in the so-called “fairer sex” eclipsed my interest in the men-folk I encountered to a decent degree.

I knew that my parents wouldn’t approve. Despite the excesses of wealth and general social depravity of the Crocker Corporation and all who inhabited its social circle, my parents had a great fondness for pretending to be upstanding, pious people. This typically manifested itself in the form of railing against “degenerates” of various kinds, which was understood to include all forms of folk who weren’t explicitly interested in maintaining a good Christian marriage, as well as any Black or Alternian folks around.

I knew this, and yet I also knew in my heart that it was wrong. After all, I had turned out to be one of these so-called degenerates and I knew that my heart wasn’t full of the evil they ascribed to anyone who was even slightly different from themselves.

So I broke from their conventions. By the age of 16, I was sneaking out to meet up with girls I fancied. When I turned 18 and was finally considered to be at least nominally an adult, I only increased my dalliances. I fell in and out of love many times, but I tried my best not to break any hearts. I had mine broken once, but it wasn’t so bad that it couldn’t mend.

After a year more of that nonsense, I finally made a commitment – I was very much in love with a gal who lived nearby. She wasn’t quite of my social standing, but she was a thoroughly lovely person both in spirit and physical form. I thought that if anything could make my parents see the error of their ways, then surely seeing myself and my young lover holding hands chastely and looking resplendent in our pure love would warm their hearts and put an end to the seeming curse of the Crocker name when it came to matters of… well, anything except for making money and crushing the weak.

Sadly, I greatly underestimated the capacity of my parents to hate – as we often do as children.

I came home with my lover one day and we sat to await the arrival of my mother and father on their way home from an afternoon stroll. The two of us sat quietly in the sitting room and talked – both of us were quite nervous, of course. But we had discussed this before and we knew what we were going to say. It might not be traditional, but there were parts of Europe where the practice was very much coming into its own.

Of course the Alternians didn’t consider such an arrangement to be in any way disagreeable or taboo, but I feared that to even mention that would arise my parents’ xenophobia – it would be wisest to leave the entire idea of the trolls out of the matter entirely.

So there we sat, waiting nervously, with hands linked together. I still remember the day – a beautiful late September where the air was just starting to take a bit of a cool edge to it. And I looked into my lover’s eyes and I wished for nothing but to be able to continue like this forever… because I was finally happy.

My mother came home and saw us sitting together. She saw the way our hands linked and the way we looked at each other. My mother was spiteful and full of hate, but she was not stupid. She knew what she was looking at.

That was the last time I set foot in my family home.

I never did learn what happened to my lover. I imagine she was paid off to never speak of the matter again.

I hope she was paid off.

I shudder to think of the alternative.

But that was where my story diverges from the Crockers of wealth and power, and becomes that of the Crocker of struggle and perseverance. And that story has been told – how I joined the New York Police Department and became a Detective. How I became disillusioned with the world of the law and dropped out to become a private investigator.

And I built myself a life. I survived things I never even thought were possible to BE, let alone survive. And I found another love in a way I had never expected.

And despite all the hell, I had found my place within it. And I was serious when I told Terezi that this was it – when we settled things up here, we were going to go somewhere that we could finally be at peace.

And then I saw my mother’s name on a piece of paper that tied back to something I should’ve known had her fingerprints all over it… but the space of time and distance from my family home had obscured it.

I saw the name Elizabeth Crocker at the bottom of that letter… and all of a sudden I have a very clear idea of where all this was going.


	16. Proper Preparation

**South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Sunday, 4/10/1938 (third derivative) _

I didn’t want to jump into things too quickly. For one thing, Mituna was still shaken up about everything that had just happened. Heck,  _ I _ was still shaken up about what had just happened. Terezi didn’t talk about it much, but I knew from the way she’d been talking before that this was wearing on her just as much as it was me.

I felt bad about it – about assuming that she was just kind of  _ okay _ with everything. It was a ridiculous thing to think. After all, I’d seen a side of Terezi that was tender and kind. No one who had that in her could witness some of the things she had and remain unaffected by it.

So we took a couple days to simply rest. June made food for us – she seemed to enjoy the chance at normality. Vriska was looking a lot healthier and complaining a lot, which meant she was basically doing fine. June even started to look a little bit less drawn-out, although I very much doubted that she’d be able to hold up to another round of… whatever we were calling her ability these days.

It was Sunday afternoon when we gathered around the table to finally hash everything out. I’d avoided talking about the issue because I wanted to get my own head straight first. Once that part was taken care of, I figured I could let the others know what we should do.

Problem was, my own self-reflection had just thrown into sharp relief how little I really knew about my mother’s affairs since I’d left her house at the age of 19. After that, I’d had no contact with her and she’d never tried to reach out. Even if I’d wanted to mend things between us, there had never been the opportunity.

Around June and Vriska’s kitchen table we all sat, eating a roast that June had prepared. It was delicious and the whole experience was pleasant, but there was a dark cloud over everything.

“I was going to start working there on Monday,” Mituna said quietly after she’d finished eating. “I wasn’t sure of the details – just that Ms. Crocker’s letter said that Ms. Peixes should have me transfer over there.”

“Where were they going to put you?” I asked, wiping my mouth and setting my utensils down.

Mituna frowned and played with her hands – thinking. “I’m not sure – I was supposed to go to the Trans-Southern building down by the railyard and report in there.”

It was as good a place to start as any other. Because even though I knew that my mother and her corporation were involved, I still didn’t know precisely  _ what _ they were involved in. I thought for a moment that it might be something as simple as trying to genuinely build a rail monopoly, but it seemed like considerably more than that.

“Well… you can’t do that now.” I shook my head. “If they were willing to send Spades after you, that means that you’re marked now. I’m sure Diamonds has already figured out generally what happened.”

It was a puzzle for me to solve – considerably more complicated than the last. We needed to not only know how to get inside, but we needed to know what place we needed to be in and what exactly we were looking for when we got there. I doubted very much that they would simply let us walk in through the gates.

Or maybe they would. Maybe they cared enough about what we might’ve seen in Mituna’s office that we might be able to get away with not being killed for long enough to strike on our own. It would be an incredible long-shot, but it was about all I was coming up with.

“Talk to us, Jane,” Terezi murmured. “What’s the play here – cause I’m not seeing a good way to take this.”

I shook my head, trying to clear the cobwebs out. There was a way to do this… maybe a way where we could all come out of this ahead of the curve. We had a couple days until the deadline, but I had no idea how much things had changed from the previous times where Vriska had died. Or I had died…

“I wish we had some kind of help here…” I was almost thinking to myself. And then my mental engine kicked on and started humming.

There was one person who might be able to help – and he owed me.

I stood up without saying a word and walked to the telephone. It was a long-distance call – I’d pay the charges – and I remembered the exchange by heart.

The phone rang a couple times, then someone picked up on the other end. A familiar voice from years in the past.

“Ampora, who is this?”

I smiled. “Eridan Ampora… you owe me.”

A pause. A sharp intake of breath. “Crocker? Well… I can’t say I expected this. What do you need?”

“I need you down in Austin, Texas – and I need you to bring your rifle.”

Another pause – longer this time. It wasn’t going to work. Whatever promise had once been extended had long-since expired.

“I’ll fly out tonight. I’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon.” And the line went dead.

I turned to look at the others. All of them but Mituna were staring with their mouths open. Mituna just looked confused.

“Who’s Eridan Ampora?” She asked, looking at each of us.

I smiled. “He’s going to be our wild card.”

* * *

The onset of night had taken the temperature down from “broiling” to “tolerable” and I was sitting with Terezi on the front porch of the house, enjoying the gentle breeze that had started to blow. I had a lot on my mind – between the hail of violence that’d been unleashed in the last few days, the knowledge that I’d probably died in at least one iteration of the past week, and seeing my mother’s name again like that.

It was a lot.

Terezi and I were on a swinging bench that June and Vriska had, just sitting together. I’d stretched out on the bench and Terezi was leaning up against me, basically sitting in my lap. It had no right to work as well as it did, but I was comfortable. Given everything that’d been happening lately, I’d take  _ comfortable _ right now. Had precious little of that in the last week.

“Jane… I’m sorry…” Terezi was quiet, sounding thoughtful.

“Why?”

“Your mother… I knew she was bad from the little you said, but I didn’t know about all of that. You and your gal… shit.” I felt her chest heave a little as she let out a sigh.

I tilted my head down, resting my chin between her horns. I could smell the rich, slightly earthy scent of her hair and I found myself wishing that this was all I had to worry about in life. Just mundane things – what we were going to have for dinner or whether or not we wanted to have a pet. Maybe we’d get into an argument once or twice about something silly and then make up when we realized how trivial it was and how short life was.

“I should’ve said something a long time ago.” I paused to kiss her between the horns and she murmured softly in approval. “It was something I just tried to forget about. I know I mentioned her in passing but… I made it sound like she was just a stuffy rich bitch who kicked me out of the house. It was so much  _ more _ than that. So much deeper.”

“Sure… but you also deserve to be able to live your life free of that. You didn’t choose to be born into the situation you were in.”

She leaned her head back and I felt the hair brushing my lips. She sighed again. “You were given a choice – either pretend to be someone you aren’t and stay on the inside or live as yourself and be cast from the garden.”

I laughed. “I didn’t know trolls read the Bible.”

“It’s hard to live in human society and not absorb at least a couple references, Jane.” She bumped her head back into me to show me she was just playing around. “You’re being too hard on yourself for something that you had basically no control over. Shit – you were basically just a kid, still.”

The conversation lapsed into silence and I looked out into the night. The gentle sound of the wind and the chirping of the night insects around us was soothing. I liked it down here well enough – if it was just moments like these in isolation, I figured I’d probably never want to leave. Could just enjoy my time with my gal and live a quiet life.

That wasn’t meant to be. Whatever chance I’d had at making a quiet life for myself had gone out the window when I kept sticking my nose places it didn’t necessarily belong. And why was I like that?

My hand – the one that was around Terezi – strayed down a bit. Toward a scar on the side of her stomach that had been left by a pile of trash with a bad temper and access to a hot iron.

I was like that because I didn’t know how to be any other way. Because no matter how much I had tried to cover it with drinking, or cynicism, or a nihilistic worldview… I couldn’t stop caring about other people. I couldn’t switch off the part of my brain that looked at everything that was happening and scream  _ this isn’t fair! _

“I don’t know if this will work,” I said softly. “I have a plan, but it’s not great.”

“You mind sharing?” Terezi pushed herself back into me, settled down.

“No, I don’t mind… the problem is it’s not much of a plan. I know my mother and her company are involved, which means this is big. But I don’t know what their whole thing is, so I don’t know how big or in what way. I called Eridan because I don’t want Diamonds or some other mug to shoot us in the back.”

Terezi laughed. “Yeah, that seems like a good goal to work towards. But what makes you think going there is even a good idea? What’s the idea – we just roll up in there and… what?”

I shook my head. “Terezi… I’m going to have to ask you to trust me. No matter what happens.”

I felt her… shaking in my arms. Like she had suddenly caught a chill wind and couldn’t stay warm anymore. “I do. But… I’m…”

Her voice dropped. “I’m scared.”

I don’t think I’d ever heard her say that before. I’d seen her vulnerable – and I think I was probably the only person who really had – but I don’t think I’d ever actually seen her  _ afraid _ .

“I’m scared that whatever you have planned won’t work and this is gonna end badly.”

I wasn’t going to lie to her – wasn’t going to tell her that my plan had no risks. To say that everything was going to be all right. I had no way of knowing that – had no right to make that kind of promise.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said – honestly. Terezi turned herself to the side, rolling over.

She was facing me – her eyes slightly teary and her face close to mine.

“I meant what I said about wanting to get away after this. I meant all of it.”

“I know,” I said – I’d meant it too.

“I love you, Jane. A whole hell of a lot.”

I was starting to cry. “I… I know.”

That didn’t feel like enough – I opened my mouth.

“I love you too.” I came out as a whisper. I knew she heard. She shifted forward and her lips were… right next to mine.

This whole thing had a very last-day-alive kind of feeling to it and I wasn’t sure why. Of course, I knew my plan could easily go belly-up and then it would be.

Heck, I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. I was just making stuff up as I went along and hoping that my experience and instincts would carry me through. This was evil on such a vast scale that I could barely get my head around it, let alone make any kind of sense of how to cope with it.

I kissed her – kissed Terezi. Let the feeling wash over me as we lay there on that bench swing and held each other. I wrapped my arms around her – pulled her in and held her close. It wasn’t the kind of kiss that was going to lead anywhere. Not right then – I don’t think either of us was much in the mood.

But sometimes it’s nice to just… feel close to someone you love. To share that physical bond and not feel so utterly, cosmically  _ alone _ anymore.

Terezi pulled back a bit and smiled at me. “I’ve… really liked being with you the last few years. I’ve been a lot happier than I used to be.”

I thought on this – and I couldn’t argue with it. “Me too.” Happier than I’d been since I was 19 years old and fully realizing how cruel the world could be for the first time. It was a lesson I wished I’d never had to learn.

One way or another, my plan was going to go into action the next day.

One way or another… this was all going to end.


	17. Seen From Afar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter contains several major character deaths and descriptions of gun violence. Please use discretion if these are triggers for you.

**North Austin, TX** **  
** _ Monday, 4/11/1938 (third derivative) _

The plan had several moving parts and relied on at least two other people. There were about a hundred different ways it could go wrong and probably only one or two it could go right. I was nervous and jumpy and… honestly… scared completely out of my mind.

The first part of the plan started once we picked Eridan up from the airport. We drove to North Austin, north of the railyard, and I told him where to go. I told him exactly how we’d be approaching the building – the office of the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation. Eridan wouldn’t be able to talk to us – he’d be too far off for that – but he’d be able to keep an eye on us all the same.

How did I know my mother would be there? A hunch. Because she’d personally requested that Mituna show up, and I had a feeling that this was the kind of thing she wouldn’t trust to some subordinate. It didn’t feel right, so I trusted my instincts. I’d known the woman for 19 years – this was something she’d want to see to personally.

The second part of the plan had the rest of us – everyone except Vriska – driving right up to the building and walking straight in the front door. It was risky beyond all description, but it was the only way I could think of to make the rest of this plan work. There were too many unknowns for it to function any other way. And maybe it was a bit overwrought but… I’d spoken to everyone involved and they all felt like it  _ could _ work. In those uncertain times,  _ could _ was about the best I was going to hope for.

* * *

The Trans-Southern corporate building was a towering lump of ugly stone that jutted up above the railyards. There was no pretense there – no illusions of grand architectural beauty. Instead, it was an ugly, functional building whose existence perfectly summed up everything that defined the Trans-Southern Railway Corporation.

Surrounding the building was a fence, and that fence was punctuated in the front by a gateway and a low shack that probably served as a guard station. Of course, the plan being what it was, we parked out car right in front and walked directly up the guard station. Myself, Terezi, Mituna… and June. I hated to do this, but it was the only way I could think of.

Outside the guard station, two fellas with guns were standing there.

And let wonders never cease – they were none other than the Short fella and the Giant fella we’d had our little altercation with in the bar! I almost laughed at the irony of that. Of course they were the ones.

They recognized us as soon as we got close. Of course they did. Short walked right up to us, brandishing a pump-action shotgun.

“Oh looook!” he said, drawing out his syllables. “It’s the two dames that went off on Bobby the other day!” Okay, so  _ Bobby _ was the name of the creep that Terezi had flattened. That was… definitely a piece of information.

“They know that trespassing is illegal here in Texas?” Giant called out. He was holding some kind of bolt-action rifle. “They know what we can do to trespassers?”

Short laughed. “Pretty much whatever we want!” He racked the slide of the shotgun, chambering the first shell.

“That’s right!” Giant called out. “Pretty much whatever we want.” He lifted his rifle to his shoulder.

I raised a hand high in the air and pointed. That was the last mistake he would ever make in his life.

Giant’s head exploded a half-second later and he dropped to the ground like a rock, his rifle clattering down next to him. The crack of the high-powered rifle echoed off the buildings in the distance a fraction of a second later. Mituna jumped and I grimaced – this wasn’t where I wanted to take things, but I knew that it was probably going to happen.

Short had dropped his shotgun and was raising his hands high in the air. There was a dark stain filling the front of his trousers and he was crying. I walked up and pulled out my own revolver.

“Look, if you want to keep breathing normally, do me a favor and call up to your boss and let her know we’re coming up.”

“My boss?”

I smiled and pulled back the hammer on the revolver. I don’t think I was actually planning on shooting him, but there was still time in the day. “Yes, your boss. The one in the big office at the top of the tower or wherever she spends her time. Don’t mess with me.”

Short nodded frantically and ran to the guard house. He picked up a telephone and spent a few seconds shouting into it while nodding frantically and gesturing to someone who couldn’t even see him. When he hung up the phone, he came back right away.

“She’ll see you… she said to bring you straight up and to please put your guns away. She says you won’t be harmed.”

Oddly enough, I believed him. If she wanted a war, it would’ve been just as easy to kill us.

But there was one last piece I needed to move onto the board first. I turned to June.

“You remember what I told you before, right?”

She nodded and I patted her on the shoulder. “No matter what, don’t go inside the office.”

Again, June nodded. She looked at me and said in a voice too quiet for the others to hear. “You remember what I said?”

“I do. Last chance, right?”

She smiled, sadly. “Last chance.”

* * *

The trip inside the building was, at least, uneventful. The inside was considerably more impressive than the hulking exterior, and I could see my mother’s influence everywhere. Lots marble and black granite, creating a monochrome palette that brought back a lot of painful memories to see.

Short left us at an elevator – he pointed to it and shuffled off. We all stepped on board and the implication was clear enough – top floor. Straight up.

“How much do you need?” June asked me. I shrugged.

“Just where the office is, I guess. To be honest, this is almost more than I expected.”

“I’ll find the fire exit. They have to have one.”

I nodded. That would work.

The elevator slid to a stop and the doors opened to reveal a long corridor with a set of massive double doors at the end. There were no guards – no one sitting at a little desk out front. No secretary.

This was my mother’s lair, all right. She would trust only a handful of people, and they would be lurking in the shadows.

I put a hand on June’s shoulder. “Go. Find out as much as you can. They’re not going to expect you to be doing it. When you’re done, come back like we said.”

She walked off down a side corridor marked by exit signs, looking for the fire stairs. And if anyone caught her, she could easily play the role of the misguided employee. June had worked in plenty of similar-enough offices that she’d be able to move around in ways that the rest of us couldn’t. Well, maybe Mituna could – but I needed her for another part of this plan.

This was the part where everything could go wrong so easily – where all the moving parts had to synch up in just the right way. We walked forward – to the end of the corridor – and I pushed open the double doors.

The office was grand, but surprisingly sparse. There was a heavy desk at one end by the large window, and a series of file cabinets. Next to the file cabinets was a single decorative folding screen – it looked like something my mother had claimed she brought back from a trip to Japan to advise the Emperor. The walls were barren save for a few portraits. I saw one in the corner that I recognized – a family portrait that had been painted when I was 17. Seeing that brought tears to my eyes.

Seated at the desk, in a high-backed chair, was a woman whose face I had scarcely thought about for more than a decade.

My mother – Elizabeth Crocker – was sitting behind the desk and smiling at me. It was, perhaps, the most unsettling smile I’d seen in my life.

“Janey!” She called out to me – I hadn’t heard anyone call me that in a long while. “Janey! Please come in! You and your friends.”

I walked up and sat down at one of the several leather chairs in front of the desk – Terezi and Mituna took two of the others.

My mother tapped the desk. “I’m so  _ glad _ that you finally decided to come in and say hello. I’ve been watching your exploits… wondering when you’d finally decide to stop in. It’s been so  _ long! _ ”

To say that this was strange would be underselling it – this was the gosh-darn strangest thing I’d been through recently – including the implications regarding the nature of time itself. My mother was… smiling at me like I’d just come back from a semester at boarding school.

“Elizabeth…” I started. My mother shook her head.

“Please don’t call your mother that, Janey, it’s rude. You may call me  _ Mother _ – it’s been so long since you did.”

“You don’t seem surprised at all to see us… Mother.”

She shook her head and clicked her tongue softly. “Of course not. My Janey is a smart woman. Do you think I haven’t been following your journey from afar? Do you think I don’t know all about the business in New York? Or in Boston? Or about all that work you do for the young Harley heiress?”

“We don’t work for her, she just funds us.”

My mother shrugged and twirled her hand in the air. “Of course, of course. It’s all petty details anyway. The folks you help… they’re so far beneath you that they could never hope to understand.”

“Beneath me?” I growled. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, don’t give me that nonsense, Janey. Even though we’ve had our falling outs, you’re still a Crocker at heart.”

I balled up a fist. “You kicked me out for bringing a gal home! And you paid her to disappear… or killed her or something!”

My mother… laughed. She laughed and slapped the desk. “ _ Killed her _ ?! That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

My heart jumped just a little – that maybe my mother wasn’t the irredeemable monster I thought. She smiled at me, and her eyes narrowed.

“After all, Janey… I have people for that.”

And my heart dropped out…

There were two quick  _ cracks _ of a pistol and I jumped. I looked to my right and Mituna was slumped in the chair, a single hole in her forehead and her eyes open in the forever-stare of the dead. I choked back the urge to scream… and I turned to my left.

Terezi was bleeding from a wound in her chest – the bullet had missed her heart, but she was struggling to breathe.

That time, I did scream. I jumped out of the chair and ran to Terezi… her teal blood was oozing from the wound and she was gasping.

“Oh god!” I didn’t know what to say… didn’t know what to do.

Terezi… smiled at me.

“I hope it works out…” and she gasped again – it was too much for her to keep talking. I held her and sobbed and screamed and she wrapped her arms around me… then pushed me back. I stumbled a little.

The next shot hit her in the head.

There wasn’t anything after that… not for her, anyway.

And even though I knew that this might happen, I was fighting the urge to turn and shoot my mother in the face with every fiber of my being.

“Oh please.” My mother’s voice – calm. “You’ll get over this one just like the last one.”

I turned to face her… and as I did, I saw Diamonds Droog stepping out from behind the decorative screen, holding his small pistol. He nodded at me.

“What’re you going to do?!” I screamed at her – and all at once I was 19 years old again. Still scared of what she could do to me. Still afraid of the world and how it didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t some aberration simply for liking a gal in a way I wasn’t  _ supposed to. _ “Are you gonna kill me too, you  _ fucking bitch?! _ ”

She clucked her tongue at me again… and somehow that was even  _ worse _ than if she’d started screaming back. Because this wasn’t personal to her. This was just  _ what you did. _

“Oh Janey, I’m disappointed. You’ve grown so much but at heart you’re still the same child you always were.”

I kept my eyes locked on her – turning away would mean looking at Terezi’s  _ body _ and my brain wasn’t ready to process that’s what it was yet. It wasn’t  _ her _ anymore… just the irrevocable remains of what she  _ was _ .

My mother got up and walked back to a safe in the corner, clicking the dial a few times. Diamonds kept his eye on me, ever-watchful, with the faintest of smiles on his face. The sick bastard was  _ enjoying _ this.

When my mother returned to the desk, she had a thick file folder that she dropped on the desk.

“You always were a small thinker, Janey. I knew it even when you were still a child. I’m not here to threaten you or kill you – if I wanted to do that you never would’ve been allowed to walk up here in the first place. I’m here to  _ offer you a job. _ ”

This wasn’t real. None of this was real. I struggled to stay focused – because that was the only way this was going to come together. Focus. Focus. Focus.

Terezi was dead.

Focus!

“A… job?” I couldn’t believe the words, even when I echoed them back.

My mother  _ shrugged _ . “You’re naive and silly, but you’re a smart, talented girl, Janey. I could use your help.”

“With…  _ what?! _ ”

“Oh, this and that. I know you talked to Mituna so you know about the whole Appalachian thing. Well, see, that was a bit of a trial run.”

The strike-breakers. The guns.

“A trial… run?” I was going into shock – trying to keep myself in the moment enough to stay focused. This was important. It was a safe. A safe in the corner. Remember that. Fire exits.

“Of course,” my mother kept smiling at me and I wished that she would just  _ stop _ already. “After the damn trolls stepped in when they showed up in Europe… we could’ve done so well over there. But there are other ways to make opportunities. Other avenues to explore.”

I breathed – tried to focus entirely on my mother. Still going into shock – be aware of it. Stay on top of it. Ignore everything except what was required to keep me in the moment.

“You’re talking about…” I knew what she was implying. She was right – I wasn’t stupid. “...about starting a  _ war? _ ”

My mother shrugged again. “Maybe. The specifics aren’t as important. What  _ is _ important is that we take advantage of the instability we find… or create… and use it to build what we have. I’m surprised you don’t understand that… you were doing basically the same thing by capitalizing on the misery around you in New York.”

“To make  _ money?! _ ”

“You’re being silly again, Janey. This isn’t just about money. That’s nice, certainly, but there are lots of ways to make money. No… this is about creating an  _ empire _ .”

An empire. She sounded like a villain out of a dime-store novel when she said it. But she believed it… and she was capable of doing it.

“You see, there’s no reason for me  _ not _ to. All I need to do is… tip the scales a little.” She waved a hand. “The balance of power shifts one way or another. Humans… trolls. Various countries all vying for their own piece. And all we have to do is step in when needed – to provide the spark and the kindling alike.”

She looked me in the eye, and I had to fight back to urge to vomit.

“And you’ll be able to come home again! Just think, Janey – you can come back to the house and everything!”

I stared at her. “You killed the woman I love!”

My mother recoiled and her mouth twisted in disgust. “Oh  _ please _ . I know these little dalliances of yours make you feel so wonderfully defiant, but really… she was just a  _ troll! _ ”

I wanted to go for my gun again – to make her  _ pay _ for that. To really make her  _ feel _ it. But I needed to hold on… just hold on…

I heard the door to the office bang open, and I heard June call out. “I’m here!”

One shot at this.

“The safe in the corner, in this office!” I yelled. “They’re planning a war!”

That was it – that was all we needed. Because the last part of the plan was in play now. Last piece on the board.

It wouldn’t matter, but what I did next would be cathartic, if only for a second of realization.

I pulled out my revolver… thumbed back the hammer…

And as everything went all off-side and fuzzy…

I shot my mother in the head.

* * *

**South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Sunday, 4/10/1938 (fourth derivative) _

I had finished explaining my plan to June and  _ only _ to June. It was important that the others didn’t know about it. I wasn’t sure  _ why _ that was important, but it felt right. There were things that needed to go just right, and having a plan with this many complicated pieces – it was going to be a nightmare to pull it off.

“So… I don’t love it, but it’s all I can think of. I’m sorry, June… this is the best I can do.” I reached out to put a hand on June’s shoulder – I felt terrible about putting her through this again, but it was all I could think of. Everything else was so full of holes.

Even with Eridan involved, it was still going to be risky. And trying to think of his role… of everyone’s roles… the way I needed to. It was tough.

I heard June gasp and… she looked different. It was like she came back inside of herself after having been away, and she fell to the ground, heaving. Her eyes were wide and she was shaking.

“Oh god!” She yelled – then seemed to take stock of herself. “I’m sorry…”

“June?! What happened?!”

She sat for a moment, breathing heavily and trying to stand. Finally, she just sat down heavily on the floor and looked up at me.

“In the safe in the corner of the big office on the top floor. You said they’re planning a  _ war _ .”

I would never know how it had gone the first time around. Never know what happened or what I had witnessed. Part of me was a little bit curious, but most of me didn’t even want to know.

What I did know was that we were going to reach right into the heart of my mother’s empire…

And we were going to burn it to the ground.


	18. Royal Flush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter contains descriptions of gun violence - please use discretion if this is a trigger for you.

**South Austin, TX** **  
** _ Tuesday, 4/12/1938 (fourth derivative) _

June and Vriska’s house was becoming crowded – in addition to the two of them, myself, Terezi, and Mituna we now had Eridan Ampora hanging around looking dour and unimpressed with the general state of the place.

My original plan had called to have him watch over us while we walked the approach to my mother’s corporate fortress…

But that wasn’t  _ really _ his part in the plan – at least not his final role. I was trying desperately to think in terms of how the constantly shifting line of reality could work to our favor, and to my credit I had finally come up with something that would work.

There was no way for us to get inside the Trans-Southern building and find what we needed. We knew nothing about the layout, the dangers within, or the location of our ultimate goal. Not having this information would mean that approaching the building would be suicide.

Unless we’d already done it before.

Apparently, the first part of the plan had worked. June refused to tell me too many details, so I assumed it hadn’t exactly gone off without any flaws, but it had worked to the point where June knew the basic layout of the building, had found a back way inside, and knew where the location of certain key documents were. I’d also said something about my mother planning a war, which was a deeply unsettling thing to hear.

The second half of the plan was just as complex as the first – but this time we wouldn’t have the benefit of a do-over if something went wrong. June was well and truly exhausted – even the jump back of a few hours had left her reeling and I wasn’t going to ask her to risk trying another.

We needed to get inside the building, and we weren’t going to be doing that during the day. We were going to wait until late at night when it would be closed down. We also needed a distraction.

And that was where Eridan’s new role came into play. He was going to take his rifle and find a weak spot in the Company operations and start making noise. Hopefully that would draw the Company heavies – namely Diamonds Droog – away long enough to give us a chance to slip in unnoticed. Subtlety was the name of the game now… at least on our end of things.

We’d all agreed to the plan – we sat down in the living room and talked it all through. Now we were just sitting around and looking at each other awkwardly.

But there was one last thing that bothered me.  _ The Royal Flush. _

The place Vriska was originally supposed to die.

The one name that hadn’t come up again since we’d started on all of this.

“June, do you know anything more about The Royal Flush? I’m sorry… it’s been bothering the heck outta me,” I said. Maybe she’d picked up something else that I didn’t know about.

June shook her head, looking pensive.

“I know it.” It was Mituna – she had a look of excitement on her face. “I know what that place is!”

We all turned to look at her.

“Yeah!” She said quickly. “I went there once or twice. The Company uses it to hold cash before they send it where it needs to go. They’ve basically got their own bank down there.”

I had no idea why Vriska had been there all those times she ended up dead. Maybe she was looking for someone, or maybe she was following up on a lead into the Company. At this point it didn’t even matter.

It was giving me a great idea for a distraction. I turned to Eridan.

“I need a couple of things – how good are your contacts down here?”

“Things like what?” Eridan asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Things that explode.”

* * *

**The Royal Flush – Austin, TX** **  
** _ Tuesday, 4/12/1938 (fourth derivative) _

I felt like I was about to rob a bank.

And, in a way, I supposed I was.

We pulled up the Royal Flush in the early evening. Against June’s objections, Vriska had agreed to be our driver. She was staying in the pickup truck that Eridan had gotten for us. Terezi, Eridan, and I made up the rest of our group. All four of us had on bandanas – Terezi made a crack about cowboys in the Wild West – and we were armed with brand-new M1 Garand rifles that Eridan had procured from… probably better not to ask questions about that one.

We also had a bag, and that bag had a surprise for the Company in it.

Vriska pulled the truck up in front of the club and settled in, her rifle at the ready. The rest of us jumped out of the back and quickly made our way to the door. It was early enough that this place probably wouldn’t be open – I wondered if it was  _ ever _ open if it was just a front company in the first place.

It looked empty enough, so we ran around the back to the small service entrance on the side – lined up by the door.

No time to play with the lock – I kicked the door hard, busting the latch straight open. We filed in quickly, rifles up, moving as quietly as we could. Kitchens. Storage. Back rooms. Nobody there. Out into the main floor, by the stage. Nobody there.

Got a weird feeling about the stage area – like I’d seen it before. Another one of those deja vu things.

But there was something else. Something too… neat… everything in perfect order.

Except it wasn’t. A piece of the side of the stage was slightly out of place. I looked closer.

“I can hear footsteps!” Terezi whispered. We all looked around – Terezi listened intently. She raised her rifle and aimed it at the stage.

As I watched, a sliver of light appeared from the bottom of that off-looking part of the stage. It widened and grew into what was obviously a hatch.

Standing in that hatch was the short man from the bar the other day. And it felt like that was just too perfect a coincidence. I glanced out of the corner of my eye and saw Terezi smiling.

“Hi, short. Remember us?” She snarled.

Of course, we had masks over our faces, but Terezi had a fairly distinctive voice. It would be hard to mistake her for anyone else.

He froze. Terezi laughed.

“So… whatcha doing down there, Short? Anything…  _ fun _ .” To emphasize her point, she lifted her rifle slightly so it was pointed at his head. Short shook his head.

“Is your big friend down there too?” Terezi asked, sniffing the air. “I think I can smell his stink from here.”

Short nodded.

“Oh… gooood. Anyone else?”

Short shook his head. This all had a weirdly familiar feeling to it.

“Oh we don’t have time for this,” Eridan said. He walked up to Short and slammed the butt of the heavy rifle into his stomach. Short keeled over – too stunned to even make a sound. Eridan pulled back the rifle and brought it down on the back of Short’s head with an unsettling  _ crunch _ and Short went limp on the floor.

“Let’s go!” Eridan peered down the staircase that was behind the trapdoor that Short had emerged from. He brought his rifle up and glared down the sights. “Follow me!”

He rushed down the stairs, followed by me and Terezi. We were quickly at the bottom of the wooden staircase – there was a door that led into a low concrete-lined corridor. It looked like it had been built as some kind of storm shelter. Or, more likely, it was purpose-built to keep whatever the Company kept down here.

There weren’t a lot of options – just a single door down at the end of the corridor – so we all filed down the hallway with rifles up. We got to the end of the hall and Eridan moved to kick the door down.

“Wait!” I hissed under my breath. I walked up… and knocked.

We stood off to the side and waited. After a minute, I heard a familiar voice from behind the door.

“God… hold your shit… I’m fucking on my way…”

The door cracked open and Giant’s face appeared. He saw Terezi and screamed and slammed the door.

“Well so much for  _ that _ plan,” Eridan said, rolling his eyes. “I say we just blow the fucking place up and bury him.”

Terezi shook her head. “No. I need something from in there.”

That wasn’t something we’d necessarily talked about beforehand, but I wasn’t going to question her. I nodded.

“He’s moving something around – sounds like a table.”

We could hear a muffled voice coming from inside. “Don’t try to come in here! My buddy’s out there!”

“No, he’s not,” Terezi yelled back. “You’re all by yourself!”

“Well… well I’ve got a gun! You come in here, I’ll shoot you myself!”

Terezi squinted and turned to me. “I can’t tell if he’s lying or not… he’s too panicky right now.”

I sighed – this wasn’t exactly how the plan had gone, but we had to make allowances for stuff going belly-up. I looked around the hallway, mostly just trying to get my mind going.

Up against the wall, two guns were propped up – a pump-action shotgun and a bolt-action rifle. I knocked on the door again.

“So, what kinda gun you have, fella? Cause there’s a couple nice pieces sitting right out here.”

“I… I’ve got…”

Even  _ I _ could hear the raw panic in his voice. I tried the door just to be sure and found it latched. Shaking my head, I looked over at the others. “We don’t have the time for this!”

Eridan nodded, “I know.”

He lifted his foot and brought his full weight down on the door, blasting the latch open. As soon as he was through the door, we could see that Giant had hidden himself behind a metal desk. Eridan raised his rifle.

Two shots rang out – the report of the rifle was painful in the enclosed space of the underground corridor, but I doubted it would be drawing any attention from outside. Two neat holes appeared in the metal desk, and Giant’s body fell over sideways.

Walking around the side of the desk, I could see two ragged holes in his chest where the bullets had exited. I guessed he’d been leaning up against the desk when Eridan shot it. Too bad that thin metal desks aren’t even remotely bullet-proof.

Giant gurgled, but he wasn’t able to actually say anything. I was guessing that his lungs weren’t in particularly good shape. I ignored him, looking around the room for what we’d come for.

At one end there was a thick metal door – the kind you’d see in a bank vault. It was wide open, and inside I could see bundles of cash stacked neatly on shelves. I had no idea how money I was looking at, but it was more than I’d seen in a dang long time.

Eridan walked forward and set down the bag he’d had over his shoulder. “Okay, let’s fucking do this.”

He dumped the contents of the bag out – several bundles of TNT, a detonator, and a line of fuse.

Terezi grabbed the bag from him and went into the room with the money. She picked up several of the smaller bundles and stuck them in the bag. Walking back toward me, she smiled.

“Gotta fund our retirement some kinda way!”

Eridan snorted and set down his rifle, picking up the TNT. “All right, great. Let’s get this circus on the road already.” He took the bundles of TNT and set them at various points inside the vault as well as throughout the room.

When that was done, he took the fuse and began stringing it to the bundles. He was done in a few minutes and had the rest of the fuse ready to roll back to a safe distance.

“All right, let’s get the heck out!” I called. We gathered up the rifles, Terezi grabbed the bag with the money, and we all climbed back up the stairs. Once we got to the top, Eridan set his things down and moved to pick up Short.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting rid of anyone who knows who did this. He obviously recognized Pyrope and unless you want to spend the rest of your life on the run…”

“Don’t,” I said. “If this works out, they’ll be the ones on the run.”

Eridan shrugged and put Short back down. “Whatever you want.”

He ran the fuse out to the entrance of the club and connected the detonator. I looked down at it, then over at the entrance to the underground vault – probably one of many where the Company stored its ill-gotten profit.

I put my hand on the detonator.

“I hope you burn in Hell,  _ mother _ .”

I pushed down the detonator.


	19. Checkmate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter contains a major character death and descriptions of gun violence. Discretion is advised if these are triggers for you.

**North Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/13/1938 (fourth derivative) _

We waited until the small hours of the morning to start putting the plan into action. We needed a time after the Company would’ve started to hear about their money being blown up but before their building would be full of people.

I doubted that Short was going to stick around town to tell anyone what was happening, and even if he did it wouldn’t matter. This plan didn’t really hinge on us being unknown.

Standing outside the towering Trans-Southern building, it was just Terezi and me again. Vriska was back with June and Mituna. Eridan was in another part of North Austin and had started his part of the plan at two in the morning. We wouldn’t necessarily be able to hear it from where we were, but he’d agreed to start attacking Company sites indiscriminately. I warned him to avoid killing people if possible, although I wasn’t sure how much he was willing to listen to me on the matter.

About ten or fifteen minutes ago, the few night guards that were on duty here had started becoming very active. They ran around the complex, turning on lights and starting up a couple of cars. Finally, the whole crew of them drove off out the front gate, leaving only a single guard in the front station. That didn’t bother me – we were going in the back.

I checked my watch – half past two. We’d all agreed that this gave the plan enough time to start.

Terezi and I had snuck up to the side of the fence – it was a heavy chain-link job, but I had a pair of bolt cutters I knew would do the trick. I cut us a hole in the fence and we slipped through, moving toward the fire door that June had scouted out…

I wanted to say  _ our last time here _ , but that wasn’t strictly true. By the logic of linear time, I’d never been to this place before. Part of me wondered what had happened that last time – part of me didn’t want to know.

The door was, of course, locked. But Terezi had her lockpicks, so she settled in to work on the lock, her sensitive hearing and fingers making short work of the lock. In five minutes, I heard the audible  _ click _ as the latch opened and Terezi held the door for me.

We each had a bag of tools and other supplies, but this time around, we’d left the rifles behind. We had our pistols, but I figured if we got to the point of needing to shoot our way out of this, we’d already fouled things up pretty badly.

According to June, the fire stairs were in a column that would go straight to the top of the building. No doubt this had been designed to allow my mother to escape quickly in the event of a fire. It also gave us a handy way into the building. Silently, we mounted the stairs and began to climb.

It was a long climb – about fifteen floors – and hauling the heavy equipment bags didn’t make it an easier process. By the time we got to the top, I was ready to call it a day. The good news was that we were going to be hauling the bags back out again. That was also part of the plan.

After the last flight of stairs, we got to another locked door. Terezi carefully picked the lock while listening for more guards. Once the lock was open, I swung the door out and checked the hallway – no one was visible. The whole interior had the kind of feel that just screamed  _ Elizabeth Crocker _ – all marble and granite. Cold, harsh, and unfeeling.

We left the door slightly ajar and walked down the corridor to the end – to the large double doors that could only lead to my mother’s office. Standing in front of them, Terezi put a hand on my shoulder.

“You ready for this?”

I nodded. I had so many unresolved feelings about my mother, and none of them were good. I’d tried to avoid thinking about her for so long – would’ve been fine if she simply died and couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. But she  _ had _ been hurting people. Maybe not people I knew directly, but she was hurting people all the same.

I pushed the door open. The office was mostly dark, but a handful of small lamps remained lit, casting long shadows all over everything. Other than the large desk and cabinets at one end, by the window, there wasn’t much. A decorative screen shoved off to one side and a few pictures on the wall. I saw one that had been painted when I was only 17 and a shiver ran down my spine. I’d been so hopelessly innocent back then. Part of me wished I could return to that world for just a moment, but everything it entailed was too much to bear thinking about.

“June said there was a safe in the corner,” I said. Terezi was already in the back of the room looking for it.

Meanwhile, I was preparing the last part of this whole plan. Reaching into my bag, I began to retrieve sticks of dynamite and place them strategically around the office. The specific placement didn’t really matter all that much – this was about sending a message, not conducting efficient demolition.

When I was done, I went over to see how Terezi was doing on the safe – it looked like she was almost finished. I could see her concentrating, her ear to the side of the safe – listening for the soft clicks of the tumblers falling into place.

I was getting nervous that we were spending too long in the office, but that was just me being anxious. Maybe ten minutes later, she was done and the safe swung open.

“Not sure what you’re looking for, but there it is,” Terezi said, pointing to the safe.

I took every document out of the safe and spread them on the desk. Of particular interest was a thick file folder with no label but a lot of paper inside of it. That was what I went through first.

I scanned the document, looking for anything we could use.

It took me a few minutes to understand what I was reading, but when it came to me… my heart was racing. I looked over at Terezi.

“She’s not just planning a  _ war _ …” I trailed off and shook my head. “She’s planning… she’s planning a  _ world war _ .”

Terezi laughed. “That’s crazy.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “Projections… arms deals… new factories. Plans to roll out some kind of armored battle car…” I was flipping through the documents.

“What?” Terezi didn’t sound like she completely believed it.

“There’s strategy documents in here – talking about the Alternian intervention in Europe. How to leverage that… there’s sections labelled for  _ Europe  _ and  _ North America _ .”

I paged through some more. “Here’s  _ South America _ and  _ Asia _ .  _ Africa _ .”

Each section was as thick as a small novel – containing hundreds of pages. I had no idea where to even begin.

“We have to get this out of here.” I gathered up the documents and stuffed them into the bag. As I was cramming everything in, a single loose slip of paper from the top of the folder fell out. I bent over and picked it up. The top was covered in the familiar trident letterhead.

Ms. Jane Crocker,   
  
The purpose of this letter is to formally extend you an offer of employment with Crocker Industries, effective immediately.   
  
You would be employed with our Global Strategies Division as a General Intelligence Director. As such, you would be in charge of the GSD’s Intelligence Section and responsible for gathering and acting on strategic intelligence as it pertains to future Crocker Industries developments.   
  
If you elect to take this position, you will be compensated in the amount of $50,000 per annum, plus expenses, pension contributions, travel reimbursement, and all other benefits and expenses as befits a high-level executive position. You will also be offered yearly performance bonuses if target goals are met.   
  
Please be advised that acceptance of this position is contingent on the following conditions:   
  
-Immediate and permanent relocation to New York State, specifically the Crocker family residence. (you will be provided with full accomodations on the estate).   
  
-Immediate and permanent cessation of all activities related to Pyrope & Crocker, Investigators.   
  
-Immediate and permanent severance of all ties with the following individuals: Jade Harley, Vriska Serket, June Egbert, Aradia Megido, Sollux Captor, Porrim Maryam, Eridan Ampora.   
  
-Immediate and permanent termination of your relationship with Terezi Pyrope, and cessation of contact with her.   
  
If you agree to these conditions, please sign below.   
  
  
  
  
On Behalf of Dr. Elizabeth Crocker

By the time I got to the end of the letter, I was shaking. Terezi walked over – I think she could sense that something was wrong. She put a hand on my shoulder.

“Hey, you okay? We’ve gotta get moving.”

I tried to keep my breathing under control – tried to calm myself down. That deja vu feeling was coming back again.

“She was going to  _ offer me a job. _ ” I could feel my breath stuttering – it felt like I was going to start hyperventilating. “That darn… that  _ bitch _ was going to offer me a  _ job! _ She wanted me to basically cut everyone out of my life and move back to her estate in New York and… help her start a war.”

I couldn’t believe it. I knew my mother was pretty far gone, but this seemed completely unbelievable. She really was willing to burn everything to the ground if it meant she and her family would stay warm for just a little bit longer.

Terezi knelt down next to me and kissed me on the cheek – the feeling of warmth brought me back and I blinked.

“Jane, I love you and we should absolutely talk about this… but right now we need to get out of here.”

I nodded and stood up. After taking the letter and placing it on the desk, I retrieved the fuse from the bag and began to wire up all the dynamite. Fuse reel in hand, I walked toward the door with Terezi following close behind. She held the massive doors for me and I walked out, unspooling the fuse as I went.

Something hit me hard on the side of the head and I went down hard. Dazed, I tried to draw my revolver – a cold voice sounded out.

“I wouldn’t do that, Ms. Crocker.” I blinked and I saw him – Diamonds Droog. He had Terezi in a chokehold, pistol pointed at her head. “Unless you want yet another death on your conscience.”

Terezi was struggling to breath, and Diamonds had her good. I had no idea what to do.

“Now I’ve been told to play nice with you by Dr. Crocker, Ms. Crocker… you mother said she’d prefer if I didn’t hurt you. She did  _ not _ , however, offer any such guidance with regards to your lady friend here. As a matter of fact, she was quite obvious in her distaste for her entire species in general, and this example of that species in particular.”

I drew my revolver and Diamonds squeezed tighter on Terezi’s neck, his hands shifting as he did it – Terezi simply sat there as Diamonds snarled. “Don’t do it, Ms. Crocker. Last warn–”

The sound of the revolver was deafening and easily drowned out the ripe-fruit  _ splat _ of Diamond’s head as it was carved away by the dum-dum bullets I always carried. His body dropped and he and Terezi spilled onto the floor.

I dropped my gun and ran over to her, scooping her up in my arms and kissing her face. “Oh god I’m so sorry!” I held her tightly – we were both sobbing.

“How’d you figure it out?” She croaked, her throat rough from where Diamonds had been choking her. “How’d you know it was okay to shoot?”

“You didn’t say anything when I pulled my gun – I figured you knew he wouldn’t react fast enough. Don’t know  _ how _ but… I trust you.”

She laughed. “He moved his hand away, when he went to choke me. And he was too focused on not having to kill you. He was more afraid of your mother than anything else… he took too long to react.”

She pulled herself up and turned to face Diamonds’ corpse. With a sneer, she spat once on the body and reached down to gather up her things.

“Let’s get the hell out of here before we get company.”

I grabbed the fuse reel and we wound it all the way back to the stairwell and down with us until the reel ran out. I attached the detonator, prayed for the best, and depressed the plunger.

Above us, the building shook and rumbled as the dynamite went off – my mother’s office had been reduced to rubble in the blink of an eye, and it made me feel at least a little bit better.

We ran the rest of the way down the stairs and out the back, slipped through the hole in the fence, and disappeared into the night. There was one more stop to make and then the whole bloody business would be over – at least for us.

* * *

**North Austin, TX** **  
** _ Wednesday, 4/13/1938 (fourth derivative) _

We arrived at the Ranger Station around four in the morning, but we knew Dave would be there anyway. We didn’t even bother to knock, just opened the door and walked right in.

To our surprise, he was not only up, but yelling on the phone to someone. He saw us come in and motioned us to come to his office. I could hear the last tail of his conversation.

“Yessir, that’s right.”

“No, I don’t know what it’s about.”

“Yessir, ah’m sure the Feds will be getting involved.”

A pause.

“No sir, we don’t typically have buildings explode. That’s right, sir.”

Another pause.

“Yessir, I’m right on it.”

He slammed the phone down and glared at us.

“Ah get the feeling that this is neither a social call nor a coincidence. Why are y’all here?”

I didn’t respond – just pulled the bag onto the table. Dave glared down at it.

“Y’all got some kinda  _ point _ to make? Because I’ve got two bombings in the last half-day to contend with and one of them just happened at the Trans-Southern building.”

I opened the bag and pulled out a few of the papers – some of the highlights I’d found while reading.

“I think Trans-Southern might be on the way to some legal troubles,” I said quietly – I handed him a paper.

Dave began to read, skimming quickly through the document. His eyes grew wide.

“This… they’re talking about  _ treason! _ ”

I nodded. “I’m guessing the Bureau will probably want to get copies of these. I’m sure if they were to raid Trans-Southern and the other Crocker Corporation subsidiaries they’d find all kinds of interesting things.”

I stood up, leaving the bag on the desk. It had everything that Dave could possibly need to start this – everything I could possibly give him.

“Wait!” He called as we started to walk out. “Wait a minute! Y’all need to stay here! Give me a statement! Y’all need to stay here and help us out!”

“No.” I turned back to look him in the eye. “No, we don’t.”

Without looking back again, we walked out of the Ranger station and into the pre-dawn haze.


	20. After the Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't thank you enough for sticking with me! I had a goal of finishing this by 4/13 and it looks like I just made it, since I'm posting this at midnight on 4/13 having just finished it a few minutes ago!
> 
> The Homestuck fandom is one I'm still pretty new to, but it means a lot to me. I've met some truly wonderful people and gotten to participate in some amazing creative projects.
> 
> Y'all are the best - keep doing what you do, and I'll be here writing!

**Fairbanks, Alaska Territories** **  
** _ Sunday, 10/09/1938 _

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner   
  
CROCKER INDUSTRIES HEAD SHOT EN ROUTE TO COURT   
  
NEW YORK, NY, Friday 10-9-1938   
Dr. Elizabeth Crocker, the disgraced head of Crocker Corporation, was being transported to a court hearing by Federal agents Friday morning when an unknown assailant sped up in a vehicle and opened fire with an automatic rifle. A dozen shots were fired, and several of them hit Dr. Crocker. While she was transported immediately to a nearby hospital, nothing could be done to save her from her wounds and she died around 4 pm on Friday afternoon.   
  
DISGRACED EXECUTIVE   
  
Scandal and outrage shook the world in mid-April when the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided a number of Crocker Corporation-affiliated locations on the advice of an anonymous source. Agents said that they discovered a trove of evidence pointing to a vast conspiracy by key Crocker Corporation executives to commit treason against the United States of America and engage in acts that would be tantamount to an act of war against several foreign governments.   
  
Dr. Elizabeth Crocker, the current head of the Crocker Corporation, was placed in Federal custody pending trial – a trial that was scheduled to start in January and expected to last at least the duration of the coming year.    
  
Other key Crocker executives are still being held without bail in various locations throughout the country, awaiting transportation to New York for the Federal trial. After Dr. Crocker’s death, the FBI have stated that they will be increasing security and maintaining a close watch on the Crocker executives in case this is more than a random shooting.   
  
A VAST WEB OF LIES   
  
Documents leaked to the press by an insider in the FBI point to an incredibly vast conspiracy that involves a number of seemingly unrelated corporations, all with ties to the Crocker Corporation. Although many of the documents we saw were heavily redacted, they suggest a combination of arms production and provocation of international conflict on a massive scale.   
  
Federal courts have already invoked anti-monopoly statutes to break up a number of the companies formerly affiliated with the Crocker Corporation. This includes the infamous Trans-Southern Railway Corporation, which gained notoriety this past Spring due to its controversial decision to arm strike-busters that were under the employ of a mining company which was also a Crocker subsidiary.

I put the paper down on our kitchen table, because I’d read enough for a lifetime. I tilted my head left and right, hearing the soft  _ pop _ as my neck loosened up. I’d been sitting down for too long anyway.

I stood up and walked over to the kitchen counter where Terezi was standing, putting my arms around her waist. She smiled and leaned into me, her bulky sweater soft and warm against my bare arms. She didn’t care much for the cold – and it was going to start getting chilly – but between the wood stove, the sweaters, and me… well, she was well taken care of.

She leaned her head back and I kissed her neck. Terezi murmured softly and I saw her cheeks flush teal.

“I wish I could see the snow,” she said. “I know it’s happening… but I wish I could see it.”

I nodded. “It’s not really coming down much yet. Just kind of dusting the trees a little bit.”

She smiled again. “That sounds nice.”

It was nice. It was usually nice up here – and I expected I would continue to feel that way even as winter came and the snow grew deep. It was peaceful – quiet and still. It was clean and clear. It was beautiful.

Terezi had taken what turned out to be a  _ lot _ of money from the vault the Company had been using. More than enough to keep us basically set forever. It had been more than enough to move us up to the Alaskan Territory and furnish a small cabin that was well-insulated against the winter chill that would soon be coming. It had been more than enough to provide for a small car and what essentials we needed.

There was plenty left, and neither of us lived lavishly. I had gotten some part-time work with the local logging companies. Turns out the skills used as a private eye aren’t dissimilar from those used in the business of managing the daily operations of a logging operation. That kept us above board as far as all the locals were concerned.

They liked Terezi too, and that didn’t hurt. She had begun to write a book – she called it a “dramatic realization” of our exploits over the past few years. With details changed extensively, of course. I had read some of it already… it showed a lot of promise. She’d left out the more outlandish elements – the things we’d experienced that stretched the bounds of believability. That was good. She also left out any details that might inspire our past to come looking for us again.

After we walked out of Dave Strider’s Ranger Station, we went back to Vriska and June’s and explained the situation. We left that morning to return to New York. Mituna had asked to stay behind – she felt it was her duty to assist in the investigation, and I wasn’t going to begrudge her a chance to try to make things right.

We got back to New York and immediately packed up. We let our clients know we would no longer be offering services. We also spoke to Jade and let her know what was happening. She seemed a little sad to not be funding a daring duo of private eyes anymore, but also understood our position in the matter. She wished us nothing but the best, and we parted on good terms.

And that began our long journey to the Alaskan Territories.

And as soon as we arrived – as soon as I saw the vast expanse of natural beauty. The cold, clear lakes and the swaths of untapped pine forests.

I knew that we were home.

“Describe it to me,” Terezi said, breaking into my musings.

“What?”

“The snow on the trees… the falling snow… everything – describe it to me.”

The snow is just starting to fall now, gently. It’s just little flecks of white right now, nothing more than glittering specs of dust drifting down from the gray sky.   
  
We already had snow before, so all the pine trees are dusted with it. Their needles stand out in stark green contrast to the brilliant white powder that covers them. And the ground is a blanket of white – like someone threw a comforter over the entire ground.   
  
And there’s a small house sitting in the middle of the snow – a log cabin with a few rooms… but that’s all it needs. Smoke rises from the chimney from the wood stove inside, and the windows are starting to frost over.   
  
Inside that house, it’s warm and cozy. The lights are mostly off because outside it’s still day and the windows let in plenty of light. The wood stove is keeping the whole place warm. It smells faintly like bread, because one of the occupants started learning to bake the other day.   
  
And in the kitchen of that house, there are two women standing with each other – one has her arms around the other, and the other one is nestling her chin into her lover’s neck and cooing.   
  
And these two women have been through hell – apart as well as together. And they’ve seen so much they wish they hadn’t…

But they’ve come out the other side, and they’re still standing. And, more than that, they’re still holding onto each other. ****__  
  
Because inside this house, there are two women who love each other very much…

...and those two women are finally at peace.

Terezi had her eyes closed as I was talking – she was humming softly to herself and leaning against me. I kissed her neck and she blushed again, still humming. The world outside was so quiet – so still.

And we in it – we were invisible here. Tucked away in a quiet place where no one would bother us. In a place where we both belonged.

We had no legacy here. No grand plans for the future. Only the desire to live in peace, and safety, and comfort… and love.

Because after everything we’d been through – every horrible turn and damnable revelation about the essential frailty of our very existence…

We deserved a chance at happiness. We deserved to be able to live.

Terezi stopped humming and shifted in my arms. “Jane?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you love me?”

I kissed her on the neck again. “I love you, Terezi.”

She sighed – the first contented sigh I’d heard from her in a long time. “I’m glad… I love you too, Jane.”

I closed my own eyes and let the feelings around me evelop me. Warm, and comfortable, and  _ happy _ .

And for the first time in my life…

I felt like I was finally home.

**Author's Note:**

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